Everyone Is Talking About THIS Terminal

[@BrodieRobertson]

Slight correction, you are able to see a list of default keybindings, you just have to launch the application with ghostty +show-config or ghostty +list-keybinds. So this raises a separate problem, the web documentation is missing a ton of basic information and why are some of these bindings not listed in the context menu. Edit: I've just gone ahead and cut that segment, that was my bad I should have looked around a little bit more.

[@mossom]

ghostty +list-keybinds

[@jay-cm]

+show-config is in the first page of the Configuration section, the same page you were looking at in the video. You just didn't take the time to read carefully and instead made a rant video about non issues (except the UI lib that's debatable). --help is always available for cli tools too.

[@polinskitom2277]

@@BrodieRobertson the THIS terminal

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@jay-cm I've just gone ahead and cut that segment now as it probably shouldn't be in the video

[@tomasruzicka9835]

I want a quick terminal. Really. When building an application that needs to run fast, it is an advantage when terminal is not the thing slowing your application down when printing stuff in the stdout. Yes you could just not print to stdout, when you need to run fast. But it's just nice when you don't have to think about that.

[@user-dc9zo7ek5j]

Description of most foss applications: This is a written in that focuses on .

[@MrAlanCristhian]

Also, it must be an appliccation with a lot of alternatives of it.

[@IngwiePhoenix_nb]

This is a written in that focuses on . (Not a dig on Go but somehow the first thing that came to mind...)

[@DizzyAndHigh]

@@IngwiePhoenix_nb rUsT rewrite when?

[@pikachulovesketchup666]

As opposed to other applications which are designed on purpose to be slow, insecure and have no features. Features, security, performance - you can only pick one. Weird that old software from last century is not included into the latest OS releases. It was fast and used less resources so it must be superior ?

[@lucascamelo3079]

This is a good way to describe. Simple and focused.

[@dreamsofcode]

This is probably one of the most sober looks at Ghostty on KZbin. Thank you for it.

[@Serizon_]

Hey didn't expect you here , honestly I just want to say thanks and happy new year

[@pwii]

I use kitty, just because the name is cute. that's how much I care about terminal choice. it's just a terminal.

[@MrAlanCristhian]

I use gnome-terminal because it's the default one. That's how much I care about terminals.

[@ASilverNMeep886]

I use kitty because it is a dependency for an anime watching/browsing program (fastanime).

[@vilijanac]

I just installed and tried, kitten icat doesn't render even in it the some png image.

[@bananaj]

Right? I use foot because it runs natively on wayland and has a funny name. But if I could bring the kernel's basic tty inside the graphical environment I'd just use that instead.

[@Roxy53280]

i use konsole if i need zmodem and kitty if i don't.

[@setaindustries]

Me, who uses a terminal that actively leaks memory: ._.

[@ai-spacedestructor]

there are worse things it could be leaking XD

[@billeterk]

There was an impressive memory leak in a recent iTerm2 version on the Mac. Mine was up to 370GB when I killed it.

[@MikePainstill]

@@ai-spacedestructor Yea, like the sun. The sun is leaking, the su-

[@Walter_]

​@@billeterkWhat Mac device even supports 370 GB RAM? I'm sure you meant 370 MB. Since if you paid for 300 GB+ ram then you would totally be using it instead of letting a random program take it unnoticed.

[@2012knp]

@Walter_ swap file

[@wtfisgoingon535]

Thanks you for calling the bs with GTK4 lib-a.

[@comically_large_chungus]

as if KDE apps look good in a non-KDE environment lmao

[@hadockzin]

It comes with libadwaita by default but it is not a requirement, you can disable it just by setting gtk-adwaita = false in the configuration, and can also be removed at build time.

[@comically_large_chungus]

@hadockzin reading docs is hard ok

[@guss77]

​@@comically_large_chungus it actually does - konsole looks the same in all Linux desktops as well as on Windows and MacOS. It even has sensible window decorations.

[@comically_large_chungus]

@@guss77 ok how about dolphin, kate, krusader, or any other application that makes heavier use of graphics than a terminal

[@netfri25]

as long as the terminal that I currently use is able to run commands, I'm not gonna change it

[@NostraDavid2]

It being _fast_ is an important feature for an application that you're using often. Though if you're using WezTerm, Alacritty or Kitty (among others), you're already on the fast side.

[@KajuTheRudeMonke]

@@NostraDavid2 "muh termenul executes communds 0.00000000001% fuster than urs, scrub"

[@BrocolliLand]

So you're on uterm ?

[@netfri25]

@@BrocolliLand I used GNOME's terminal, but after a while I got annoyed with some things in it, so I tried alacritty and that's what I'm still using today

[@BrocolliLand]

@@netfri25 GNOME terminal is for GNOME. Alacritty is for window managers.

[@pi_ist_toll]

Honestly, it's overhyped, but the founder Mitchell Hashimoto wrote a blog post "Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0" which states exactly that.

[@flarebear5346]

I mean he has no one to blame but himself on that front

[@StagnantWaterDolphin]

@@flarebear5346 what do you mean?

[@qlx-i]

@@flarebear5346 you can't really do much if something blows up.

[@Rozenmorte]

@@flarebear5346 Most of the hype I saw came from Theo.

[@GSBarlev]

It's kinda hilarious how he originally had no intention of releasing it, which just made a whole bunch of people harass him and beg him to publish it.

[@guss77]

Also, the kitty graphics protocol is implemented on konsole.

[@moarjank]

so is sixel, which has much wider support.

[@BenjaminWheeler0510]

Hate to say it but I’ve used the graphics stuff in kitty exactly once. It’s cool but really unnecessary when you can just open files in your image viewer and get more features with basically no drawbacks lol

[@RenderingUser]

​@@BenjaminWheeler0510 but file previews when navigating files is great. Also images in markdown notes inside neovim is also great

[@pablolichtig2536]

@@BenjaminWheeler0510 I use it a lot over ssh, where opening with image viewers tends to be slow if possible at all.

[@SkyyySi]

​@@BenjaminWheeler0510 The protocol allows to render images arbitrarily, it isn't just a way to `cat` an image.

[@TurntableTV]

The creator, Mitchell Hashimoto, said that he doesn't understand the hype either. This was done mostly by influencers in the tech space.

[@ghostrevolver3332]

It's the name and the logo. That's it.

[@georgehelyar]

It really seems to be macOS first with Linux as a second class citizen

[@ronny584]

Yeah since the creator is a MacOS user

[@themacintoshnerd]

which I'd say is odd because most mac power users use iTerm and swear by it.

[@randomcloudinsky]

Windows be like 😢

[@valroz]

i am on mac, and I find ghostty to be snappier than iterm2, even though both use metal also the configuration of ghostty is better than iterm, and the documentation is good as well

[@linkarzu]

@@themacintoshnerd​​⁠were, that was in the old days. Now we use wezterm or ghostty and view images inside neovim 😉

[@vilian9185]

3:00 it's a gtk bug, and in the issue report they said that they aren't going to fix because GNOME don't implement the Wayland protocol, GTK only cares about GNOME apparently

[@Iuigi_t]

Why should they care about other stuff? It's for gnome, not for other stuff. The developer should be held accountable for using the correct toolkit because, in the end, GTK is just one of many toolkits (albeit not a very modular one)

[@KSPAtlas]

​@Iuigi_t GTK is one of the big two toolkits on Linux, alongside Qt. It also has bindings to a lot of programming languages, while Qt seems to be essentially C++ only with a few ports

[@covkie]

for both GTK3&4 theres some up-to-date patches in the comments of MR #6212 (on the GTK gitlab) It's absolutely infuriating that they won't even consider merging them unless mutter implements cursor_shape on their end... I run the patches and they DO work and DO fix the cursor inconsistencies (On compositors that implement the protocol like KDE or Hyprland). Soo annoying 🤒

[@whoman0385]

​@@covkieyou still need to jump through some hoops to get it fixed on hyprland

[@qlx-i]

@Iuigi_t no. Gtk is the de-facto toolkit on linux and is used by basically any secondary DE other than KDE (that being: MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE, whatavaethehell ElementaryOS uses, etc.). GNOME split off libadwaita specifically to stop their dumb decisions from leaking into GTK,

[@k1logr4m51]

Am I the only one bothered by how slow it is to open? Kitty opens instantly when I press the hotkey, but Ghostty takes like half a second, up to 2 seconds sometimes.

[@CNich90]

Noticed the same thing. Kitty is near instant. Ghostty has a noticeable lag. Maybe because of the dependency on gtk???

[@DubsCheckum]

it probably has a ssh backdoor in its standard libraries built-in

[@AhmadMughal1]

@@DubsCheckum lol good one

[@TheMachina42]

@@CNich90 Yes it's GTK without the GTK backend it's instant, same on MacOS

[@mchenrynick]

"The blazing fast Terminal". That reminds me of how Internet browsers always advertise themselves LOL!

[@iennefaLsh]

Some Linux distros aren't free of this sin either.

[@DimkaTsv]

At least with browsers there are things to speed up (i am not delving into about if they actually improve them, or not). But are there really much things to make faster in terminal? Not tools, but in terminal itself? Well, i guess UX can be improved via autocomplete and stuff. But still...

[@mchenrynick]

@@DimkaTsv In the Terminal, most of the speed is going to be on the user. Having all of the keybindings you need is going to be the most important.

[@mchenrynick]

@@iennefaLsh Customization and ease of access is what really matter most. Unless you are running like an old 486 processor, the desktop runs smoothly regardless of which distro you're using.

[@DimkaTsv]

@@mchenrynick sure, but doesn't that mean that there is no point in all these terminal forks. Just having good default preset and ability to create custom bindings should be able to cover userbase. What else they can improve on in terms of speed?

[@gladbr7629]

> "designed to look, feel, and behave like you expect an application to behave in your desktop environment" > made using libadwaita you can't make this up

[@Finkelfunk]

> Uses + instead of dashes for option flags Seriously, this is the first time I've heard that this is even a thing. Doesn't this make parsing WAY harder? Like, you can just use the standard args that are already parsed and ready to go in the native C API, or you can just try to write your own weird API for it and do extremely unnecessary work.

[@Mmuitd]

> using meme arrows on youtube

[@CNich90]

Does anyone else get bothered by not using standard flags for the commands? Why the plus? It’s harder to type

[@GrumpyCrash]

Every time i ask "Why should i try ghostty" or "Whats the advantages of ghostty?" the answer is always the same "yeah.. aehm.. well.. it's.. just better!" It's even more over-hyped as IMAP back than.

[@jkash3383]

unironically the only thing I can actually think to say about ghostty in the few hours Ive been using it, is that it feels snappy, but even then so is kitty

[@ForeverZer0]

The same can be said when comparing kitty, alacritty, and wezterm, etc. Ghostty is just another addition to this group of high-tier terminals. Reasonable people will disagree on which is best, and it is no one's duty to try and sell you on which one is good for you, the decision is yours alone. If you like it, then use it. If you prefer kitty, then use that, the feature-set for each is on-par.

[@alvallac2171]

*more overhyped than IMAP *back then.

[@TheMachina42]

I think there are cool features, I don't think it's anything ground breaking or earth shattering, but it's basically the best standard compliant implementation of a terminal i've seen, I live in the terminal and didn't have to do forensic analysis into github issues and stack overflow to understand why a keybind didn't work as expect in a TUI application. It's fast like most terminal these days but still, it's fairly plug and play, sane defaults, very easy to build from source. I mean is it worth switching over ? probably not, is it good ? yes definitely. I also really love that they have all the iterm2 themes out of the box. Took me 5 minutes to tweak and I was good to go.

[@GrumpyCrash]

@@TheMachina42 what are some of the cool features kitty, wezterm,.. don't have?

[@wisnoskij]

"Make a useful homepage" A DL link, and link to the docs, an image of the product, and a short description. What more do you want?

[@mupmuptv]

A cute anime girl 😜

[@TheMet4lGod]

IMO, the selling points should be on the home page and not buried in docs. I really do not care about ascii art animations.

[@untlsn]

@@TheMet4lGod For some ppl noce looking landing page is better then a block of text Specialy that ghostty in mainly for macos users

[@GabriellSimic]

​@@TheMet4lGod this

[@Ignisami]

A short description of why I should bother downloading the application, for one. If i have to click to your docs to learn why I should care about your app I’m not going to care about your app. Edit: a few screenshots of what the app looks like in use would also not go amiss.

[@roccociccone597]

It won't replace alacritty for me.

[@guguludugulu]

The only issue i had with alacritty is slow launch. But then I made an alias `alacrity create-window || alacritty` so that only first launch would spawn a new instance. I'm not sure yet what the hype is about with ghostty.

[@ikcikor3670]

12:26 you know what terminal is also blazing fast (from what I'm awarefaster than alacritty/foot and even ghostty), has built in terminal multiplexer and supports the kitty image protocol? kitty

[@liangwang4518]

Kitty rendering relies on monospaced fonts actually having the same width so it can be rendered independently. Using fonts (particularly the italic variant) actually have some glyphs that exceed the regular box and leaves some portion cut off. That was a deal breaker for me when I used it

[@generic694]

Kitty doesn't have a multiplexer (in the sense of, e.g. WezTerm or tmux).

[@sjalvmordsvalsen]

What are your sources for kitty being faster than foot or alactitty? foot is the fastest terminal and has benchmarks to prove it.

[@pablolichtig2536]

@@generic694 It does, I use it daily. You need to map it to be comfortable, though. Haven't tried WezTerm, people say it's great.

[@Eagledelta3]

And Kitty actively ignores any standards that the dev deems outdated requiring special config to get SSH sessions to work properly at times

[@insanemal]

The speed difference is super important for dealing with gigantic logs. I personally use kitty but stock terminals are not good enough

[@doublescoopovanilla5835]

I'm genuinely curious about this. For ne massive logs were always easier to parse with piping to grep and tail. What's the use case for you?

[@insanemal]

@doublescoopovanilla5835 Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for, you're attached to a machine on the other side of the world and the added latency of a slow terminal is really noticeable. Hell even when you do know what you're looking for and you get eleventy billion results it slows things down a lot. Also using less on the remote end runs horribly. I just crank up the scroll back and it's a far smoother experience

[@insanemal]

@doublescoopovanilla5835 Also sometimes your dealing with serial at the remote end. Which just adds to the fun

[@TheMachina42]

@@doublescoopovanilla5835 There are even dumber reasons, but sometimes you cat the wrong file, and if your terminal sucks, you basically have to ctrl+d and restart a new one. There are other examples but slow terminals are actually noticeable if you area using the terminal.

[@doublescoopovanilla5835]

@@insanemal That's fair.

[@houseflygaming]

nothing will ever convince me to move from Konsole.

[@BrodieRobertson]

People keep telling me it's good

[@murmurorum]

I started using konsole when I got a steam deck and it has yet to cause me enough pain to want to use something else.

[@cnr_0778]

@@BrodieRobertson And yet, it's not. Well, not as good as Alacritty at least. It's got some minor annoyances that really start to add up. Also it keeps selecting a strange font that messes up letter spacing.

[@shoukokomi8081]

@@cnr_0778 >And yet, it's not. Well, not as good as Alacritty at least. How so? >It's got some minor annoyances that really start to add up. Also it keeps selecting a strange font that messes up letter spacing. What annoyances? If you can change fonts in config file on Alacritty then there's should be no issue on changing fonts using UI or maybe skill issue?

[@YonatanAvhar]

​​@@BrodieRobertson Konsole is great, the only issues I've encountered with it are that if you have shortcuts on your top bar, they have menu accelerators (keyboard shortcuts) that may conflict with CLI shortcuts (such as Alt+s to split, conflicts with fish's "prepend sudo" shortcut). I ended up just removing everything from the toolbar and remembering the shortcuts. Edit: I forgot to mention you cannot remap them or disable them, it's just hardcoded

[@rls__]

7:14 boy do I love it when the terminal emulator boasting native toolkit has the main window hardcoded to be libadwaita but the error popup actually feels native.

[@bahmoudd]

When creating a terminal, ask yourself these three things: 1) Is there anything wrong with any of the terminal emulstors that exist now that your terminal emulator would fix? 2) Do people want another terminal emulator? 3) Would it have any features that set it apart from any other terminal emulator?

[@cobaltmn5716]

there are SO many FOSS programs that are like this. The Linux program ecosystem in particular is full of overcooked programming projects and solutions looking for problems.

[@mjs3188]

​​@@cobaltmn5716 I see this as a good thing. It's the FOSS ecosystem working as intended. People are learning, building, and might stumble on something actually revolutionary. The issue is not with that process, but with trend chasing in the programming industry. New frameworks, new terminals, new IDEs, new blah. Everyone is looking for The Next Thing for the sake of it being new. You don't NEED to switch to the latest thing. I've been using "whatever the fuck Mint comes with" for my entire career, and not once have I needed some terminal feature it doesn't have. It's a terminal.

[@Eagledelta3]

@bahmoudd Mitchell has been very clear that The project for him was purely a for fun project to learn zig. Period. The fact that people liked it doesn't mean anything. I personally have tested it against WezTerm and Kitty. It's by far faster than both terminals using my personalized config.... And that's really all I care about

[@pai64]

well there are 17k or so stars on the repo. It either gonna crash or be better. We will see, many people changed to ghostty answering some of you questions yes.

[@Lubieerror]

This terminal was literally released just because the second answer was big yes. The creator didn't plan to release it, but the community pressured him to do so. With other 2 it's more complicated. He is more OSX user, so this terminal should compete mainly with other OSX terminals. Seems like all 3 are yes. I don't want to blame you for not knowing the context. It's just a program that suffers from success.

[@JamesColeman]

I tried ghostty myself as well, and my biggest complaint is its based on the Adwaita toolkit. The reason I'm on KDE is because it allows for more vertical screen realestate which allows you to have more information on screen. The title bar for Konsole with tabs is 26 pixels, where as Ghostty with tabs is 86 pixels. I lose 60 pixels of space for text if I use Ghostty. Now the reason I do not use tmux is because that is the tool I use when I connect to servers, and I have one tab per server. Using tmux within tmux isn't recommended. Am I interested in experimenting with different terminals? Yes, but I need one that at least have tabs. So far Konsole fits my needs, and I don't even notice performance problems if they exist.

[@JamesColeman]

Giving Kitty a try, and it is quite possible my next terminal.

[@AyanDaftary]

@@JamesColeman any reason to not try konsole? its pretty simple and feature rich, and integrates with yakuake perfectly.

[@JamesColeman]

@@AyanDaftary Yeah, I've been using Konsole for a bit now, but everyone is talking about these GPU accelerated terminals so that's the whole reason to try something new. I can't use alacritty because it lacks tabs, but kitty has tabs so its worth trying out.

[@pablolichtig2536]

@@JamesColeman I haven't tried Konsole because I don't use KDE and didn't want to install all of the dependencies, but I can vouch for Kitty, at least in my case. I know that in systems with old versions of tmux it can have problems, but I haven't encountered those, and am loving kitten ssh and kitten icat.

[@JamesColeman]

@@pablolichtig2536 The only thing I ran into with kitty so far, if a server doesn't have the `kitty-terminfo` package installed, it can act funny with ssh. I need to research more to see if I can force xterm support for ssh on systems I don't have control over.

[@the_kovic]

My terminal of choice is KDE's Konsole because it was already installed and I haven't found a reason to bother installing and setting up anything else yet.

[@enemixius]

The only thing I'd recommend as a complement is yakuake, it's basically Konsole but in a drop-down window. For me it covers like 90% of my terminal needs.

[@untlsn]

​@@enemixius Specialy when you get used to clicking f12 to open and close

[@enemixius]

@@untlsn I change it to Meta+Space though.

[@fred-2.7182]

Same. :-) Before I've switched to KDE I've used Alacritty, but Konsole does everything I need very well.

[@MisakaMikotoDesu]

Anything GTK makes me wanna avoid it. Gnome has tainted the entire toolkit I feel.

[@JackedLinuxUser]

whatever happens my beloved Konsole will not be abandoned!

[@untlsn]

I suggest to try out konsole child yakuake

[@unfa00]

Yakyake is IMO just a different way to use Konsole :D And I need it to live. Dropdown terminals FTW!

[@xyve6129]

I got so sick of switching between Kitty and Alacritty that I switched back to Konsole lol

[@untlsn]

@@unfa00 that's why I called it child Because it's just konsole wrapper

[@I0NE007]

I know the whiteboard is meant to be a portmanteau of Ghostty and Alacritty, but... Ghostitty makes me think that it's a blend of two much more common, Non-Linux related words.

[@MrBelles104]

I get the second word, but what is the first non-linux word?

[@I0NE007]

@MrBelles104 Just normal Ghost, sharing the letter T. Ghost and...

[@NostraDavid2]

"Ghost nipples". It's NSFW (if that wasn't obvious). It's when a woman's aureolas are roughly the same color as her skin.

[@discomallard69]

I don't think so, all of these terminals are named with the format word + "tty" or word that ends with tty: kitty (kitty ends with tty), alacritty (alacrity + tty) ghostty (ghost+tty). The itty in the board doesn't make sense to be the 'itty' from alacritty. He was just making the joke you mentioned.

[@linuxdragon57]

I've seen that mouse thing only on Gnome and libadwaita applications. Could it be a libadwaita bug rather than a KDE bug?

[@3ventic]

It feels like a weird choice for a terminal application to not invoke EDITOR within the application itself for "open configuration".

[@Qyngali]

Title made me look for info about the "THIS" terminal.

[@rizkyadiyanto7922]

ttys

[@punkrockllama]

THIS terminal is almost as good as THAT terminal

[@gladwinmohlamonyane4033]

I tried it out on day 1. Removed it on the same day. Gotta say that the marketing was so much better than the final product. The target audience is Mac users who may have Linux systems they work on occasionally.

[@necuz]

Good call on btop, one of the first things I launched on cosmic-term and immediately knew it needed more time in the oven.

[@VioletRM]

how to choose a terminal: If one is already installed with your DE: Use that Else: Use alacritty

[@SeralyneYT]

That it's GTK4 with Libadwaita pretty much kills it for me. Like stuff like Lutris at least makes an effort to fit in on KDE. GTK4-Libadwaita just is gonna look off anywhere that isn't GNOME. And even then, if you use anything that isn't libadwaita there as well.... yeah...

[@kaaaada4647]

Excited -> yay -S ghostty-git -> an hour later... -> excitement turned 2 disappointment (because of lost time since really nothing to hype about here) -> yay -R ghostty-git -> kitty -> excited again (cursor trail makes me happy)

[@lauriran]

kitty has its annoyances but also the flashiest features. Alacritty, WezTerm and foot are also great.

[@brice.rhodes]

The fastfetch issue is due to the fact that internally ghostty will initially launch with a different size than what you actually see on scree since it doesnt matter as GTK is not up yet so it will "incorrectly" report its window size until GTK is fully up then it sets window size correctly if you add a sleep 0.1 or 0.2 in your shell init it should work just fine Redrawing is GTK fault it doesnt render and resize at the same time you also ignored `ghostty +help` there are many many features listed there, which shows you keybinds etc

[@FagnerLuan]

So they should wait for the window to finish the load before execute anything

[@comradepeter87]

Why does it even begin rendering/running any script before it's ready?

[@brice.rhodes]

@@comradepeter87 your shell runs it not the terminal

[@demanuDJ]

Libadwaita again... Sorry but I will stay away from it

[@ehotblch9602]

Takes me back to when Brodie used to make software review videos. Thanks for that one!

[@Margen67]

Raccoons need HUGS

[@sakamocat]

tfw i just kept the same thing my linux distro came in with and never bothered to rice it out of plain kde and kitty:

[@Manstrual]

3:00 generally happens when app rescale is set to native and doesn't match your system. At least on Cosmic, this is. What happens is either the cursor changes size, or the app becomes fuzzy and such.

[@zea_64]

Throughout the whole video I was wondering why there's so much hype for this if it's so opinionated and simple yet not simple, but then you said there's a bunch of stuff exclusive to macOS and it clicked. This is by Apple people for Apple people, the philosophy makes sense now. That also explains why it's so hyped: Apple people finally seeing something we've had for ages.

[@chainq68k]

Apple user here. What exactly Linux terminals have, that is missing from say... "iTerm2" on the Mac, that I'm using for over a decade now? It has basically everything that is now hyped up with this terminal. Including GPU acceleration. You know something is just hot air, when among the first features it mentions which language it has been written in...

[@AshesWake-sf7uw]

Uh, they can use kitty on Mac lol How are they missing out 😂

[@javierflores09]

I don't think it is the case of something being hyped over being their first introduction to it on the Apple side rather, that demographic cares a lot more about how a thing is marketed rather than the showcase of its functionality, so it makes sense they're pushing in that direction for the Apple ecosystem. All in all, it is still a good terminal, and they seem to be trying interesting things such as a standardizing an embedded terminal that feels native everywhere, instead of the mess we have across the different editors right now, as well as minimizing configuration as much as possible which is something the Linux world severely needs right now

[@FirstYokai]

Stop being so narrow-minded. How old are you, 12?

[@jay-cm]

ApPlE BadD, am I right guys???!!11 it's not like most terminal emulators are available there too, it's not like macOS is UNIX, oh wait.

[@Mishaye]

2:57 That particular problem is a gtk bug that that had a fix merged recently for the next gtk release.

[@Kapendev]

Great take about the "Fast terminal" marketing. Like, it's just a terminal. How slow can that be? No idea about that one terminal build with JS and Electron though :)

[@BigEyesLuigi1]

JS + Electron based Terminals are horrible (e.g. Hyper) . A terminal app just renders text on a screen, why the hell do we need JavaScript for that when there are native alternatives… I used to own a low-end PC so performance matters. Using Electron terminals are unbreably slow. Just because something can be written in JS does not mean it needs to be written in JS

[@theairaccumulator7144]

@@BigEyesLuigi1 they write it in JS with Electron and React because they don't know anything else lol

[@GegoXaren]

If a terminal prints slowly, it can slow down applications.

[@Kapendev]

@@GegoXaren Almost all languages/libraries should be fast enough to draw some text on the screen. Terminals are really simple compared to other programs.

[@GegoXaren]

@@Kapendev It is still a problem. That is why GNOME developers spent time on speeding up the VTE library, as it was slowing down prints too much.

[@GenoppteFliese]

When you spend 30 hours restoring a backup and later find out, that the same restore only takes a few hours when the output is not sent to stdout of that terminal, you know that you used the wrong terminal and speed actually can be an issue!

[@taukakao]

Seems like there are other issues there apart from rendering the text. I don't think this would go much faster in another TE.

[@CoderThomasB]

10:38 The tab overview is actually part of libadwaita, and can also be seen in other Gnome applications like Gnome Console and Gnome web, it isn't something special to Ghostty. I agree the tab overview is quite a nice feature, I just thought the context that the tab overview (and the tabs themselves) are a libadwaita widget might be useful to know. For that matter, Gnome Console looks incredibly similar to Ghostty, so you might want to have a brief look a Gnome Console just to see where Ghostty is actually different.

[@amy31337]

If the terminal doesn’t have built in tmux support (ie reopening precious tmux sessions, creating new tmux sessions on split) what even is the point????

[@Destroyer954]

Konsole is still the best for me. It has so many great features, but mainly a scrollbar for every terminal, even inside split views. If you have huge logs with tens of thousands of lines you can actually move around that very quickly (ofc I would use grep or smth, but that only is helpful if I know what i am searching for). And for everything else there's tmux or zellij.

[@rauldragu9447]

I used to use Konsole when I was on KDE and I actually hated the scrollbars. In vim it served no purpose, only took space away. For long things I use `less` anyway and the scrollbar doesnt work there either, or I open it up in vim where I have a scrollbar plugin. As for tmux, I'm currently using it and I hate. I feel a huge difference in how sluggish it is, the leader keybindings are just awkward, and it can't pass some key combinations to vim (ctrl+backspace). And then there is that stupid bar that most of the time only has 1 tab in it. The killer feature I would love to see in a terminal is some form of persistent sessions that are baked it, work really well and dont have useless features. I haven't yet tried zellij, maybe that a bit better, but I don't think expect it to what i want.

[@Destroyer954]

@@rauldragu9447 Less and vim still aren't perfect when dealing with files you are unsure where to jump to, but with that said, Konsole does allow you to have "custom profiles" and within a profile you can set scrollback size and if scrollbar should be visible or not. Then you can either make this profile default, or you can turn it on e.g. for a particular tab As for persistancy I think Wezterm has multiplexing? But I haven't tested it so I am not sure.

[@rockpie.iso.tar.bz2]

5:43 he does need it, he uses Arch (btw)

[@cubemaster1298]

The best part about this terminal is the free advertising of Andrew Kelley's project.

[@itguydave2164]

The giant cursor thing drives me nuts with a 4K monitor, especially in apps like KeePass XC... I've spent months trying to fix it to no avail whatsoever!

[@trimclain]

Thanks for a great video, finally not just some useless glazing on my feed. FYI: there's a `ghostty +show-config --default`, which will include all default keybinds.

[@pixl_xip]

Being on GNOME, I'm kind of glad we finally have a good GNOME terminal.

[@MorganEdgy]

THANK YOU, finally someone addresses those dang gnome-looking-only apps

[@Lampe2020]

Way back when I used GNOME and later on Cinnamon I just used `gnome-terminal`. I think it was the default on Unity too. Now I'm on KDE and use Konsole, which I find better than `gnome-terminal` (like many KDE versus GNOME components). But I'm very much a default kinda guy.

[@boringpolitician]

2:04 - I also have clock in the uppermost right corner! I used to have a lot of other widgets as well (cpu usage, mem, weather, disk space), but I found it to be too crowded and I really didn't watch much of it. The clock though, I use it more like that than I do the taskbar clock.

[@rhwinner]

A new terminal? That's like a new paper clip. 😂

[@flovertech]

how did you shrink the browser window @ 4:07 . Looks very handy.

[@pxkqd]

Glad they're getting whatever recognition they can for a good project. It's just not something I need, Konsole is enough for me.

[@jjaimealeman]

Doesn't matter if it's kitty, titty, or shitty ... a terminal is a terminal is a terminal. As long as i can run tmux & nvim, it's all good!

[@tomaszgora4353]

Installed. Went to docs. Docs website has no search form. Ok back to current term for now xd

[@tomaszgora4353]

And yes. The cursor thing on hyprland is the same. Dunno why. All other gtk apps I run don't do that.

[@danko95bgd]

Just use --help

[@tomaszgora4353]

Bs argument. Of course I can use term help. Why every build docs website with poor UX?

[@alpacamale2909]

4:38 yeah those are standard terminal copy and paste, I always change them to ctrl c and ctrl v because then I end up using those wacky shortcuts on other programs by mistake.

[@stefanalecu9532]

I get rebinding Ctrl-V, but what do you do when you want to close a currently running process? do you do ctrl-shift-c instead?

[@opposite342]

8:00 ctrl+tab also works, and is basically standard on things like kitty, wezterm, etc alongside most browsers as well. So imo the keybind being familiar is true for me. 9:50 They are bound ootb just not listed on the website. Running ghostty +show-config --default --docs and pipe into less or vim will give you everything alongside default keybinds. I think this should be written on the website too Personally, ghostty to me is kitty with shaders (same applies for lio). I am running ghostty on a gnome system and then on a hyprland system I have kitty.

[@georgehelyar]

Just to add to this, the standard is pretty much alt for windows, ctrl for tabs, so e.g. +f4 closes a window/tab, +tab goes to the next, +shift+tab goes to the previous, etc. I don't know if ghostty does that but that's what things commonly do.

[@Eagledelta3]

Ghostty is Kitty with shaders that doesn't actively disable/ignore standards just because a dev thinks they're outdated..... Doesn't matter if they seem outdated, if all of the Linux Server OS distros use it, it's still a standard... Specifically that kitty isn't compatible with standard xterm values for TERM and if the target machine doesn't have Kitty's terminfo files you have to install them using the kitten command or a system package.... Something I would not allow on a server since it's not necessary for the server to run and no other terminal needs such files for SSH

[@opposite342]

@@Eagledelta3 tbf, Ghostty still wants you do tinker with XTERM value when ssh-ing because it doesn't appear on ssh machines yet.

[@Eagledelta3]

@@opposite342 While that's true, I don't run into things like backspace doing weird things like adding spaces instead and other similar issues. I get a TERM warning, but things still work

[@DenisSadomowski]

I'm on GNOME. If I wanted desktop integration, I'd use modern VTE terminals like Black Box and Ptyxis. If I wanted Kitty features, I'd use Kitty. This looks like its main point is to replace the default terminal on apple mac, which most people on that platform are still using. Linux support is an afterthought, and it shows.

[@smiles-channel]

I like Ghostty because it's well-rounded. Unlike Alacritty, it has a lot of features. Unlike Kitty, the UI elements (like tabs) aren't ugly. Unlike Wezterm, it has a simple config format. Unlike Kitty and Wezterm, if you have a broken config the terminal will still launch instead of just crashing. The performance is on par with other terminals

[@awdsqe123]

What features are alacritty lacking? I've never felt limited by it.

[@anafabula]

Kitty doesn't crash with a broken config. It starts with an error message, but is still usable, just like Ghostty

[@ThisIsSparta-k2m]

​@@anafabulanot true, try starting kitty if you give it a default font that doesn't exist. It will crash.

[@smiles-channel]

@@awdsqe123 Tabs, font ligatures, support for displaying images

[@smiles-channel]

@@awdsqe123 Tabs, font ligatures, displaying images

[@KingSvenDeluxe]

The default/standard key combination for copy/paste in a terminal is ctrl+insert/shift+insert. All of my keyboards have inbuilt shortcuts for these, most "programming" keyboards will.

[@opposite342]

"The THIS" Terminal

[@johnsmith1966]

8:20 the problem with tmux is it can interfere with other "advanced" terminal features. I use alacritty's vim mode to copy text from the terminal. Having two tmux panes (or whatever they're called) open horizontally can make it difficult to copy multiple lines from just one of the panes.

[@unfa00]

That's when you can hit Ctrl+B, X to maximize current tmux window. Repeat to unmaximize.

[@BernardoHenriquez]

Terminator is the best terminal

[@鉄血不死鳥]

I use it too and it works great

[@gg-gn3re]

yep, tested ghostty for a week now it's nothing special. In fact since they have fancy window effects when you open a new tab it's actually slower than terminator which just opens it lmfao

[@linaori]

Been using this for years, maybe around 10 years even.

[@dexterman6361]

Konsole has SO many features I take for granted that I only realize how much I rely on then when using something like gnome, for example.

[@Cisien]

personally, I don't understand what I get out of using anything beyond KDE's default konsole. It does what i need and doesn't get in my way. What is the actual benefit of using something else?

[@alexstone691]

Honestly at this point konsole is great, only gripe is i do not know how to transfer config elsewhere

[@Klaymore-QT]

Yeah I don’t get it either. I think people just want to feel special by not using the default terminals. Even Ptyxis and gnome terminal get the job done.

[@stefanalecu9532]

@@Klaymore-QT if ptyxis had splits, that would be a step up over most terminals, let's hope it'll get more features as time goes on

[@hm_kaiser]

Switched to ghostty at home (linux/gnome) and work (macos). I spend my life on the terminal and it works fine for me.

[@berniejo5307]

idk, I just use Konsole as it came with KDE. I'm not a programmer and the only thing I do in the terminal is either fix the display brightness not working on my laptop or run updates. Though I'm going to hop back to arch on my laptop and use gnome this time as I've never tried it before (I tried manjaro again and now I remember why I fucking hate it)

[@MisakaMikotoDesu]

Konsole is probably the best terminal for just using these days. It'll be the right terminal for 99% of people I feel. The other 1% already know why they want something else.

[@berniejo5307]

@MisakaMikotoDesu absolutely, it's great for a casual user like me who does bimonthly updates or whenever a new kernel version drops. I don't need speed, I just need it to work lol

[@MisakaMikotoDesu]

@berniejo5307 I mean it's good even for people who are in the terminal all the time. It's a very well rounded terminal with most of the features people expect.

[@IncomingLegend]

i fully agree with "this is just another terminal", I just started clicking Ignore on any video about this that YT recommends...

[@polinskitom2277]

Saw it in Arch's repos, installed it, and instant coredump on running it 3 days ago. Did it get updated yet?

[@pi_ist_toll]

Idk. But btw, this was wild. Mitchell Hashimoto said he would release it on 26th December. One day later or so it just was in arch repos. That's insane overhype.

[@Yotanido]

To be fair, we did actually scrap a feature for our terminal application because it made our application basically require a GPU accelerated terminal. (The entire rendering had to be changed for it) So terminal speed can actually be a concern, as surprising as that is.

[@autarchprinceps]

Tried it. Konsole is better, Mac default terminal is better

[@13thravenpurple94]

This video was superb! I really appreciate your effort! 🙌

[@omarmagdy1075]

Well In defense of ghostty 1. the term native in Linux is really hard to achieve anyways he either had the choice of using GTK and be native to Gnome or QT and be native to KDE either way he had to make a sacrifice on one of them(So that's more of a Linux problem not a ghostty problem imho) 2. Speed kinda matters specially when catting a big log file for example(not something 98% of users do but for the 2% that does it's pretty useful) I think ghostty is pretty cool it tries to achieve a middle ground between featurefull(kitty) and speed(alacritty) but unless you are a nerd and actually care about terminals people will just use whatever terminal their distro ships with

[@salazar1554]

The point of libadwaita is that it includes the Adwaita theme in the UI components, so it fits in less than any other option. It even stuffs up themes on other GTK desktops like Cinnamon. Any other GTK or QT based Linux GUI toolkit would fit in better on anything that isn't default GNOME. Most non-libadwaita apps fit in on most GTK or QT desktops pretty well.

[@CEOofGameDev]

>new terminal just droped >most features are MacOS only ghostty? more like, Soytty or something, Amiright lads?

[@CyperN077]

It's my terminal of choice. It does everything that's required by me.. 10 lines of configuration and I'm good to go.

[@zaggernut5054]

there is one selling point of ghostty, which is the ability to use glsl shaders to give you the authentic twitchy crt monitor experience.

[@sweetbabyalaska]

ghostty +list-keybindings would have shown you the bindings, and there are quite a few other useful ones like a theme previewer. It uses libadwaita if available or configured, then GTK4. But I do agree that the GUI library they used kind of sucks on Linux, it doesn't feel that good (even though they don't use the gtk terminal stuff at all, that's all hand written, it's just windowing code) but feasibly you could write a Wayland backend here and it would feel way better

[@keit99]

Why in everything that is holy is it +? It should be -- like you know in every other commandline interface

[@twb0109]

I really don’t understand what wrong people see in GTK4, it’s as competitive as QT when used for simple applications like a terminal, and imo, looks a lot cleaner (subjective of course, but I care about the looks of my system)

[@sweetbabyalaska]

@@keit99 the + is for sub-commands like git VS git commit, and everything else uses regular flags. its a stylistic choice and from reading the code, it looks like its to make parsing easier since config parsing and flag parsing code is heavily intertwined. Not the best choice IMO but its not that bad either. Im way more sad about the use of GTK. Its kind of a failure of Linux tbh since we don't really have any good GUI libraries that aren't legacy behemoths that suck.

[@sweetbabyalaska]

@@twb0109 I don't like QT either. Neither really look good, and in the case of Ghostty gtk/libadwaita is just used for the header bar, tabs etc... but the first terminal spawn takes a hot minute since it has to load GTK. Its a noticeable lag. Also a terminal is not simple, a fully featured terminal has many complex parts and is 128K sloc at minium. GTK is nice if you use KDE or GNOME but with any other wm it makes no difference. I'd rather have a raw dog Wayland and X11 implementation

[@sakitoshi]

i'm using ptyxis because it's the default fedora 41 terminal. it works as well as you may expect a terminal at doing terminal things 🤷.

[@GregoryLoscombe]

I think the statement 'doesn't fit in with anything else' is a stretch. Would look great in a GTK4 / Gnome desktop. Given GTK is the default for Ubuntu, Fedora - again, I think its a stretch to say its the wrong default.

[@luisjavieravilaolivera2471]

yeah, sometimes people forget that gnome is the default desktop enviroment on most linux distros.

[@kerty-]

But the problem is that it looks great ONLY in Gnome

[@leovi2]

Correct me if im wrong, fedora is pure gnome and Ubuntu is gnome with some extensions, its still gnome, what do you mean by gtk4 desktops?

[@GregoryLoscombe]

@@kerty- Nah, it looks great in all. If you disagree thats fine, but the video is dire in its one sided 'GTK, thus sucks' viewpoint. Totally not objective. (sorry) Also desktops based on GTK toolkit of some desc en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Desktop_environments_based_on_GTK Budgie Mate XFCE Gnome Cinnamon On the flip side, OpenSuse is the only desktop I can think of (outside of steamos) that uses KDE by default

[@roccociccone597]

​@GregoryLoscombe GTK looks inconsistent and out of place on anything that isn't a gnome desktop. And with Libadwaita it got even worse.

[@NHOrus]

It has a feature parity with Konsole, the default terminal from KDE. Ah, also, fun thing: Open an app in KDE and jiggle cursor over the border very fast for half a second

[@reo101]

I would love a Tech over Tea with Michell, will be amazing to hear his opinions on the problematic topics you discussed here

[@shizeeque]

comparing VTE-based terminals (Konsole, GNOME-Terminal, etc) to something like Alactitty, foot or Ghostty is a blasphemy. I understand you guys have fancy RX6000 GPU and such and don't care how fast or correct your terminal is but for people like myself who are using terminal 80% of time in front of a computer, a good, no bs terminal emulator is extremely important. And before Ghostty we had Alacritty and st (which is good but lacking of GPU acceleration). Kitty is great but too bloated, the rest is for people who used Desktop Environments, they can't care less. I'm not trying to teach anybody how to use their computers, don't get me wrong. But Ghostty renders ligatures FASTER than Alacritty renders BASIC test. It is INSANE how fast this thing is. I LOVE IT! Thank you, Mitchell! P.S. and as any Zig project Ghostty is easy to build from sources so you can hack on it (changing tooltips for ex.), w/o unnecessary effort. Ghostty is such a bless I can't stress it enough.

[@sage5578]

I think the cursor changing size (and color in my case) on focus on a GPU accelerated terminal is a Wayland issue. I had the same issue using alacritty on Wayland. It is the reason I switched back to Xorg. Note, I have a dedicated Nvidia GPU.

[@weird_autumn42]

i get the same issue with the cursor changing size on ghostty, but not on kitty or alacritty, so i'm guessing a gtk or ghostty issue

[@donkey7921]

I have the same issue with steam, vscode, and many other non GTK apps, especially when using fractional scaling.

[@jQuse]

It's a gtk/Nvidia/Wayland issue. My Nvidia laptop is the only computer I have that has this issue my AMD desktop doesn't have this at all.

[@donkey7921]

@@jQuse my amd desktop 100% has this issue...

[@katrinabryce]

I use Konsole on FreeBSD, and Gnome-Terminal on Mint and Debian, mainly because they are the default and they work just fine 🤷🏻‍♀.

[@fotnite_]

You can actually disable the headerbar and enable server-side decorations in the configs, so it's not as tied to GNOME as you might first think. That said... GNOME users deserve a terminal with GPU acceleration.

[@MrAlanCristhian]

why?

[@TechJolt3d]

Well we gnome users have access to literally any other terminal like alacritty

[@jahinzee]

Re: the libadwaita thing, you can disable libadwaita in either the config at runtime (see the Ghostty config page for details) or in the build settings, and also enable support for native decorations - assuming you have the Breeze theme and the GTK settings daemon, this will make it look more much more in-place on KDE, aside from the cursor sizing bug. I will say, using GTK4 and libadwaita as the default is an odd choice for something that aims to be "native looking" GNOME-centrism strikes again! At the very least, there could be some runtime check to see if it's running on GNOME, and autoselect a default config that uses the proper toolkit and framing settings (which can be overridden by the config file if needed) However, for me I don't see any reason why to use Ghostty over something like Alacritty or WezTerm. It literally just feels identical to me, other than the terminal inspector which looks kinda cool

[@jzetterman]

I’m fairly sure this is a scenario where it’s really Mac first with Linux support added later.

[@danheneise]

The ghostty homepage is missing out on a perfect way to use the CSS terminal to display features of ghostty.

[@D.G.M.]

I personally think that a GUI terminal should have a graphical setup window. I shouldn't necessarily need to learn their specific configuration language and keywords to change something small.

[@lpdkt]

Foot terminal has been my main terminal since i switched to Wayland and every other terminal feels slower than foot does. I don't need much configuration or most features these other terminals offer so I don't see a point in changing.

[@CNich90]

Finally, someone speaking in reality. I am going to wait a bit before jumping into the ghostty train. I installed it recently and it was not a great experience. The UI as you pointed out was odd, almost tonka toyish. Beyond the UI clunkyness, I ran into some serious bugs. Typing a command wrong by accident resulted an endless stream of errors to pop up. It also was noticeably slower than kitty (my current daily driver). So much hype so my expectations were high. I am hoping if I wait a bit, all these issues will sort themselves out the ill give it another shot.

[@ErikGjertsen]

"gtk-titlebar=false" in config gets rid of the rounded corners and the massive titlebar; looks native on KDE, but you lose the hamburger menu and new tab button.

[@infinitivez]

Never really thought I'd fall in love with Alacritty, but for about a year now, I'm still using it. Any sort of "gee I wish I could...." I've been able to accomplish. If it wasn't for the choice of GTK, I'd likely give ghostty a good try. But with my zoom level set, the close buttons are minuscule pixels compared to my other windows, and it just looks funky. I've tried editing my GTK config a number of times, and it seems no matter what I try, I either get tiny icons, or I get huge margins.

[@rmmichael95]

It is nice but noticeably slower than Alacritty. I am using it but hope the startup time gets faster.