About Ghostty
Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.
In all categories, I am not trying to claim that Ghostty is the best (i.e. the fastest, most feature-rich, or most native). But when I set out to create Ghostty, I felt all terminals made you choose at most two of these categories. I wanted to create a terminal that was competitive in all three categories and I believe Ghostty achieves that goal.
Before diving into the details, I also want to note that Ghostty is a passion project started by Mitchell Hashimoto (that's me!). It's something I work on in my free time and is a labor of love. Please don't forget this when interacting with the project. I'm doing my best to make something great along with the lovely contributors, but it's not a full-time job for any of us.
The big picture of "native" is that Ghostty is designed to look, feel, and behave like you expect an application to behave in your desktop environment.
Importantly, Ghostty is a native application for macOS and Linux. On macOS, the GUI is written in Swift and uses AppKit and SwiftUI. On Linux, the GUI is written in Zig and uses the GTK4 C API1. The GUIs interface with a shared core written in Zig that we call "libghostty". For those unfamiliar with Zig, it is a systems programming language that compiles to native machine code.
Part of this is using native UI components for features like tabs, splits, error messages, etc. in contrast to many other terminal emulators that either use text UIs and custom widgets or don't support these features at all.
Another part is using standard keyboard and mouse shortcuts that you're already familiar with. Ghostty uses different default bindings on macOS and Linux to match the conventions of each platform.
And a third part is Ghostty integrates with system capabilities that are unique to the platform it is running on. For example, on macOS, Ghostty supports Quick Look, force touch, the macOS secure input API, built-in window state recovery on restart, etc. These are all native APIs provided by macOS that don't have equivalents in Linux desktop environments.
Ghostty tries to provide a rich set of features that are useful for everydays use. These can be split into two categories: terminal features and application features.
Terminal features include the capabilities that programs running inside the terminal can use. For example, Ghostty supports the Kitty graphics protocol, light/dark mode notifications, hyperlinks, and more. This lets terminal applications like Neovim, Zellij, and others do more than they could in other terminal emulators2.
Application features are higher-level features that are useful for interacting with the terminal emulator itself. For example, Ghostty supports native tabs, splits, a drop-down terminal on macOS, theme switching on system dark/light mode, etc.
Ghostty aims to be fast.
Performance is a category where people start getting really argumentative, so the only claim I make is that Ghostty aims to be in the same class as the fastest terminal emulators. In some benchmarks it is faster, in others it is slower, but in every case it should be impossible to say that Ghostty is slow.
"Fast" is also a loaded term since "fast" can mean different things to different people. For example, here is just a small list of the things that can be "fast": startup time, scrolling speed, IO throughput, control sequence throughput, framerates, etc.
In the future, I'd like to provide detailed benchmarks and explanations about how Ghostty performs in various performance categories. For the initial public release, I'll just say that Ghostty aims to be "fast" as described above.
I know many don't believe that speed is that important for a terminal emulator, but new users to Ghostty repeatedly told me that they were very surprised how noticeable the speed improvements were to their everyday use. I hope you'll feel the same way.
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Linux doesn't have a "native" GUI toolkit like macOS, but GTK4 is the closest thing to a standard GUI toolkit that exists. Most importantly, we don't draw custom widgets and Ghostty will fit right into your desktop environment. ↩
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For example, Neovim uses synchronized rendering to prevent tearing between frames. ↩