Because of your multiple "I am tired of saying this, but this text was written by me and not an LLM" in your blog posts, I want to tell you that I read it word for word. :D I know this comment adds not much but I felt it needed to be said.

I'm from the KDE project, and have been working on a new frontend built on libghostty-vt to hopefully one day ease our maintenance burden.

It's been a quite smooth experience, and I remain very excited about the lib. I believe you are successfully setting the standard. Big congrats for your 1.4.0!

Thank you for your work on this. When I was working on neovim core and started dealing more and more with the edge cases of libvterm and terminal emulation in general, I had the same thought "we should just have a gold standard library for this." But that was 6/7 years ago (2019) and a lot of stuff happened in that interim unrelated to engineering that demotivated me from pursuing it.

Periodically, I would run into TUI issues and think "I should just finally do it," especially around wanting to replace tmux in general. But I knew from experience the long tail of annoying issues for terminals that it's more time consuming than it appears, and so I again never bothered.

Thanks for the good work to raise all boats :)

I tend to move away from terminal emulation towards GUI when I can (and using custom remote protocols somewhat inspired by arcan), but TUI is still useful for a while. I actually had a need for a good terminal emulation library for the fallback TUI/pty attachment for non-gui programs for my supervisor, so I'll try out libghostty.

As a fairly recent ghostty user I was surprised with how quickly it became my default terminal. Very smooth experience so far.

Thanks for the work on getting libghostty 1.4 out! :D

Wanted to add too that I can't wait for xterm to eventually support libghostty, you've been super supportive providing feedback!

https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/issues/5686

Maybe I’m just dreaming here but how far off is libghostty for Linux consoles?

> Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: [...] freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).

That's really cool, but I'm drawing a blank; what's it used for? Embedded terminal something?

Agreed on the value of libghostty. I switched from vterm to ghostel recently and it's solved some refresh issues I previously had with vterm when using CLI coding agents in emacs.

Great stuff! If it wasn't for Rex I'd still be using Ghostty daily

Thank you for making Ghostty, it’s a pleasure to use it everyday for work :)

Is the launch timed for Halloween parties? Good job team + community!

But could it do two rows of tabs?

Aha, I wondered why the JetBrains terminals had become so much better recently. Didn't realize they'd made the switch.

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If I don't want to use the wave of "venture backed ghostty wrappers" for remote mobile coding similar to Claude Code remote, what options do I have? Any plans for a first party remote solution that's not SSH?

the web version powers our quickstart via a cloudflare websocket and some custom patches (only on desktop): https://hotaisle.xyz/quick-start

it is all open source: https://github.com/hotaisle/hotaisle-website

Why is libghostty better than alacritty?

Although not necessarily advertised as such, I've been successfully using alacritty in several projects injecting terminals into things both serious and silly.

I'm super excited for you and this, but this is mostly a highlight list of who is using your library. I was kind of excited to read about the actual changes to the library but I suppose I can go read the changelog on my own.

Yeah this is what is keeping me from using ghostty. Unfortunately I think that discussion is dead and no one agrees on the design of the three or so separate parts. I maintain a fork with quick select for my own purposes but I can’t use it at work.

Hints Mode, yummy. That would be nice.

A couple of annoyances I've had shipping CLI apps to Konsole users:

1. By default, Konsole disables OSC8 link support. Users can enable it manually, but you need to ship fallbacks by default since otherwise the default users will have a broken experience. Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, etc all ship working OSC8 support out of the box.

2. No built-in Nerd Font support, so if you want to render icons, you need to tell your users to set up a patched font or else have fallbacks. Ghostty and WezTerm ship built-in Nerd Font fallbacks if your configured font isn't patched.

That being said Konsole is much better than most emulators. iTerm2 is not bad, although it lacks Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode support (which all of the above have, including Konsole, and which is very useful for drawing prettier terminal UIs). The worst by far is Apple Terminal, truly the IE6 of terminal emulators.

1) Personal preferences: different terminals come with different defaults, some people do not want to tinker with the settings, so they just stick with whatever immediately clicks.

2) Technical curiosity: some people probably started their own terminal project just for the fuck of having made their own - and they eventually gained a userbase.

3) Feature set: Most terminals implement most features these days, but at the time these projects started, you'd have a feature matrix between features and terminals because most terminals lacked some features; so people would pick whatever suited their needs.

Personally I've been using kitty for years mostly due to 3), at the time I chose my forever terminal, I evaluated like 12 different ones, and kitty was the only one that covered most of my needs without feeling like it suffers from random quirks, and I like that it has built-in terminal multiplexer (a'la tmux) and emoji picker.

The terminal ecosystem needs to change, and these terminals support a lot of cool features. Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth, Kitty graphics, Wezterm and its mux domains & lua config, lots of cool ideas there.

Having having an industry player like hashimoto's superlogical driving terminal features is the extreme version of that

There's always gonna be something that's better, faster, bigger, badder, stronger, thicker, firmer, etc., and terminals really aren't one of those things where I am interested in exhaustively testing all of them to find the truly greatest one. A terminal is also one of those things where if you find one that is perfectly adequate then there's little motivation to even bother using trying one. And there's the whole "devil you know" aspect. The only reason I rarely try a different terminal is if the stock terminal on whatever OS I'm using lacks some basic niceties that should be expected in the year 2026.

I like Ghostty because I find it both fast and configurable, and it's multi-platform without treating macOS like the red headed step child. I also appreciate how its configuration is text-based, which I prefer to someone's opinion of how a configuration GUI should behave, and I think it's good the developers aren't wasting a second of their time thinking about a configuration GUI.

I know for many folks they like the fact that it is cross platform (works on mac/linux) etc and gpu acceleration which is really nice to have.

For me: it doesn't really "bring" anything more than what I expect from a terminal.

In Mac, we had the default terminal app which has some problems with TUI apps and other small issues. iTerm2 is the replacement that most users use, but it become too bloated with useless features and AI, while it was hard to keep a good config file that I could share between devices. Ghostty was a sane mid-term for me: a good and modern terminal, with a simple config file, maintained by someone that I trust (Mitchell Hashimoto) and only that.

About Linux: I don't use Ghostty in Linux because I'm comfortable with Konsole.

I don't think Konsole is actually faster than Kitty or Alacritty. Kitty is really nice and an innovator in a lot of terminal standards. It's also non-commercial and not related to any sort of startup (not that Konsole is either). It's definitely my first choice of the bunch, followed by Alacritty.

I assume that this depends on your computer/GPU/GPU driver.

I have used Konsole for many years and I have used kitty for about 2 years in 2024/2025, then I have switched to ghostty around the beginning of 2026.

At least in my computers (with NVIDIA GPUs and Gentoo Linux), kitty was many times faster than Konsole and Ghostty even faster.

Moreover, in the now somewhat distant past when I was still using Konsole, it did not have some font rendering features that I desired, but that might have been solved meanwhile.

A reason why the terminal emulator speed is important for me is that I frequently compile big software projects and I find it unacceptable for a compilation to be slowed down by the low speed at which the compiler output is displayed on the terminal window, which happened frequently with all terminal emulators older than kitty and ghostty (I have always used CPUs with enough cores so that compilation itself is very fast, so the older terminal emulators become the bottleneck).

For me it's simply that iTerm2 got really fat over the years, and Ghostty was a nice and slim alternative - plus it has one of the better Kitty Graphics Protocol implementations which is fun to tinker with. e.g.: https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty (needs zig-0.17.0).

I use Linux at home and Mac at work. I use Ghostty simply to have the same terminal on both systems.

For me, the main reason to use Ghostty is simply that mouse support works right out of the box. In Konsole clicking a spot to move the cursor only works if you're using Bash. While it also works with the Fish Shell on Ghostty.

I don't know about the others as I used Terminal.app on mac since Panther, but Ghostty has been a pretty good upgrade, at first offering 24-bit colour which Terminal.app didn't have at the time of its release. I also like the shell integration such as easy selection of command output. I don't ask much from a terminal as evidenced by using Terminal.app for almost 2 decades, but Ghostty has not once been an issue and is 'invisible' to me.

It works well, that’s my only requirement. I could ask you the same, what’s the point of Konsole, what value does it bring?

Kitty is really nice, a programmable terminal that does everything I want, GPU rendering, etc. Haven't used Ghostty yet but one of its advantages is libghostty, modern terminal emulation as a library.

> libghostty: a cross-platform, minimal dependency library that exposes a C API so feature-rich, correct, and fast terminal functionality can be embedded by any application anywhere.

Oh the author actually posted about it just now in rich detail. It's pretty exciting for people who spend much of their time in the terminal.

> Konsole is way faster than any of those on my computer and it has all the usual suspects I'd expect from a modern terminal emulator.

Same boat here, though I also get to enjoy some of the benefits of libghostty, via ghostel in Emacs. Ghostel is noticeably faster when there's a lot of output being dumped, but I don't often need the speed and use it only because it's integrated rather well into the rest of my Emacs.

> tmux -CC integration

If you can stomach Emacs, there are at least two packages that implement this, one via eat and another via vterm, though none via ghostel just yet. Shouldn't be difficult to port, though.

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I don't know Konsole, but kitty have tons of features other "plain" terminals lack. It's not just about speed (which I never got the obsession about either)

for terminals I personally am using kitty, but libghostty is great and powers ghostel in emacs which is amazing. Also note if you start trying to look at unicode correctness, in my experience ghostty is in general the best among all alternatives.

The other day I was able to click on Ghostty, then open Gnome Terminal, type a command and run it before Ghostty had finished loading.

The advertised point is it needs zero config to work outside of the box. For example nerd fonts are included by default whereas you need to install them if you are using let’s say iterm2.

The point for me is each one can have ten or so claudes, so any one crashing doesn't take down all the claudes ... and I don't have to learn tmux.

I can use Ghostty and use the same featureful terminal on Linux and macOS.

I also hate configuring Konsole, most KDE apps for that matter. Being able to have a plaintext configuration file I can keep in my dotfiles is way simpler.

Can konsole do the fancy shader and inline images? I think that's all that distinguishes the others but I may be overlooking things.

Lots of things bother me about my terminal emulators, and it's almost always in the category of "things don't work right". It's never "I wish my terminal emulator ran faster." Ghostty seems hyper focused on speed, with the negative side effect that compatibility breaks - in practice. I get that it's following all the newest standards or whatever it's doing, but in reality it always needs custom setup to work right. And for me the net effect is that it's always creating problems, not solving them.

vouch this comment since this is a pretty common question people have, I don't believe it should be dead.

Konsole is not gpu accelerated and is several orders of magnitude slower as a result than those that you listed?

The acceleration is the primary point.

Ghostty is so much better than iTerm2! Don't get me started...

I was sceptical for decades as well. But they are amazing - no more closing the xterm by mistake. I'm using those because I wanted for example a single window with THREE consoles open at once AND being able to handle some ANSI crazy theming.

Xterm failed me :( Tabby just works.

cute little mascots

[dead]

btw I used iterm2 for years as well and sometimes tried others.

I now use ghostty it’s faster definitely. Yes it has some quirks which is hard to overcome as a iterm2 user. But I could live with it. I think ghostty is basically also the only alternative to iterm2

I used iTerm and iTerm 2 for almost 20 years before switching to Ghostty full time in 2024 with minimal fuss besides the muscle memory of "cmd+space ite" switching to "cmd+space gho" to launch it!

Do you have specific examples of usability issues?

Very likely due to ghostty setting TERM to xterm-ghostty and your destination not recognizing it. Quick temp fix is using the wrapper (ghostty +ssh), see <https://ghostty.org/docs/features/ssh>. More permanently, copy terminfo to the remote machine, see <https://ghostty.org/docs/features/ssh>.

Probably something to do with Zig. Zig changes so quickly that if you're not using exactly the compiler that they are using, it's unlikely to work.

Here's a delicious meal we prepared for you. We don't recommend you going to the kitchen and trying to prepare it all over again.

..but you can!

Nothing controversial here.

> Escape codes are the new html for browsers now called terminal emulators.

Not really and that isn't a good thing in the long run.

There should not be any more complexity in a terminal emulator that will just lead attackers to craft RCEs exploits to your terminal to steal your secrets on your computer just because "Its cool" and has hundreds of escape codes.

Kitty is so awesome. I'm writing (well, as much as anyone writes) a MUD that models a decent part of Tokyo at 30-60fps over SSH at reasonable resolution (that's the dream, at least). I'm shocked at how fast I can render a big complex 3d environment, in the terminal.

Any source/screenshots?

Truly odd to see this comment. For me, mitchellh defines the moderate position on agents in coding, I mean that seriously: not occupies it, defines it. I’ve raised this point in discussions and others get what I mean without explanation. He’s better known for a mitigation to LLM downsides (vouch) than for making conspicuous use of them, and insists on human-only prose in issues, PRs and ‘real’ documentation (which I firmly agree with btw).

He also has a blog post and some tweets about how they can find and fix difficult bugs, and otherwise are capable of solving hard problems now. Well, they can.

Is that the LLM bug to you?

Sure enough, one minute later he posted a comment lol

tmux, baby!

I doubt that very much.

An LLM may be fine to implement quickly an application that more or less works, but I have not seen any evidence that any of them is able to write well optimized code, whenever the application is not just a duplicate of something older.

Ghosstty and a few other newer terminal emulators are not only lightweight, but they also implement very fast GPU rendering, which is one of their important advantages.

So not only their set of features matters, but also the achieved performance.

Of course, one could use an LLM to write a very fast terminal emulator, but for that a competent programmer must be included in the feedback loop, which would require many iterations and running benchmarks and emulation conformity tests. It cannot be done by vibe coding with a prompt like "write a lightweight terminal emulator".