Ghostty 1.4

These are Ghostty GUI release notes, but I want to take a moment to highlight the libghostty progress we've made since Ghostty 1.3.

As a reminder, libghostty is the highly portable, embeddable library that provides core terminal emulation, render state, and more. I always felt that a free, high qualty, lightweight, reusable terminal emulation core would benefit the developer world more than any single GUI application. And that is playing out!

It is and always was my true purpose with the Ghostty project (I said this in my first ever talk about Ghostty!). I've jokingly said many times that Ghostty GUI is just a glorified tech demo for libghostty. That's not fair though, because GUI is great and there are really talented people working on it.

Since I started the project, Ghostty has always gotten people saying "I don't understand why you'd start a terminal emulator today." Well, the answer is libghostty. It's truly unique and its enabling something special (imo!).

Highlights of libghostty since 6 months ago (none of the below was true 6 months ago):

- Libghostty has nearly 100% coverage of all of Ghostty's core (and you can compile with flags to remove any of these features for size/safety): https://libghostty.tip.ghostty.org/

- Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: Apple (macOS, iOS, visionOS), Windows (MSVC and GNU), Linux, FreeBSD, Android, WebAssembly, and freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).

- Libghostty has bindings in pretty much every popular programming language: C, Zig, Go, Swift, Python, Rust, .NET, etc.

- Libghostty's memory requirements have dramatically shrunk to enable the portability above. There's still work to do but a single empty terminal now takes 90% less memory. And at scale I've proven 10,000 active (input/output happening) terminals on a Linux server with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM.

- Libghostty powers all JetBrains IDE terminals, over 12.5 million active users. https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2026/10/jetbrains-termin...

- Libghostty is the most popular core behind the wave of venture-backed "agentic" terminals and editors, such as Herdr, cmux, and many others.

- Libghostty is being discussed and has been verbally accepted to replace the terminal core in Neovim: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/39773 (work still to be done)

- Libghostty powers a really popular and powerful terminal emulator for emacs (Ghostel): https://github.com/dakra/ghostel

- Libghostty's speed is used by Antithesis to fuzz popular terminal programs and has directly led to hundreds of bug fixes sent upstream to programs such as tmux, btop, shells, and other terminal emulators. :)

- And so much more: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty

Libghostty is really successfully turning into the tide that raises all boats. As it becomes more popular, Ghostty itself gets more performant and stable, and so does everyone else. It is also a vehicle for delivering modern terminal emulation to the widest source possible.

I plan on tagging libghostty 1.0 in the next few months and declaring ABI stability at that point!

I've tried Ghostty and it's great, but Kitty's hints mode[1] is the one feature keeping me from switching from Kitty to Ghostty. There are quite a few discussions around this and similar features in the Ghosstty-org/ghostty Discussions[2] which I follow. Most of them are references from ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2394[3]. Maybe now that Ghostty has finished implementing Kitty graphics hints will be next .

[1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/hints/

[2]: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions

[3]: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2394

I still don't understand the point of Ghostty, Kitty, Wezterm...

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.

The one feature I miss since moving to Linux and not having iTerm2 is tmux -CC integration. None of those offer it.

To be clear, I'm not attempting to be dismissive. I really want to understand what it is that they bring.

Man, still does not fix the one bug I care about: being able to quickly `⌘+F, ⌘+V` - the find textbox does not respect keyboard shortcuts: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/11159

Ghostty is so great. I am very thankful to Mitchell for dedicating so much of his time to making a terminal that is truly great. Finally, somebody really cares and has the technical abilities to materialize that care as great software.

Also, ghostel in Emacs is fantastic as well (of course in a big part thanks to libghostty) — most of my work has now shifted into Emacs as a result.

Why should I use Ghostty over iTerm2? I don't care about fancy fonts, iTerm2 speed (for me) is plenty (just tested against 1.4 -- don't see noticeable difference on MBP M1) and I do like to tweak some options/settings (and was just mildly annoyed when hitting `cmd+,` opened my default text editor...

i tried ghostty, rio, wezterm, they all stuck for about a month or so... then the subtle usability issues become too much, and i wonder why i switched from iterm2 to begin with. there's something to be said for years of polish, and feature work that is well-baked.

iterm2 is fast, reliable, and second nature. i don't have to edit settings every day.

I loved Ghostty for thr first month I tried it, but got some strange behavior when SSHing into some machines. Sounds like this release may address that. Maybe I can finally ditch iTerm2, lol

I'm still using Wezterm here due to its Windows support, and I like being able to share one configuration my company Windows and my personal Linux laptops.

I've come to like its hyperlink rules to automatically generated clickable links to Reviews/Issues/Requirements/Linter Errors/... so I haven't felt the need to switch yet to have this feature missing.

I'm eying Kitty though.

I have an interesting reason to not upgrade:

I use ghostty as my go-to terminal on my linux devices. I chose it after trying four or so with the way I work. It just works perfectly for me.

But I only really have one use case: 1) Work the way I want it to

I could list my wants as an example, but there is no point because I don't know whether my needs are being met by what they consider a mistake in their design or a feature they provide.

So you can understand my conundrum - am I relying on features and design they consider is broken? If so, my current set up will "break" for me, even if it is a measurable improvement for most other people. I don't know.

I have no reason to "fix" the "working" release for me.

This is meaningful when forced upgrades occur, because the cost of training is never borne by the software provider (looking at you, big 4 or 8 or however many there is now.)

My experience with terminals was like this - Alacritty -> Ghostty -> tty7. The last one implements exactly what I had in mind when I used Alacritty and Ghostty. Only it doesn't hype much (the author apparently doesn't strive for that much), maybe that's for the better.

Does anyone else always read this as "Ghost Titty"? (Happy Halloween btw)

Too bad it's still not in Debian.

> These release notes are painstakingly and lovingly hand-crafted by human Ghostty maintainers

Artisan call out work starts. The hipster stance in the AI world.

ghostty vs xterm.js (the VS Code terminal) - obviously ghostty is going to have better performance, but I just have never hit a performance limit in the VS Code terminal. I don't understand the demand for an ultra-accelerated terminal engine, but it's so popular it must be something i'm missing...

Here's a recent interview with Ghostty's creator about its philosophy, goals etc. https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/interview-with-mitchell...

I love ghostty and libghostty.

thanks to libghostty, ghostel.el is the nicest terminal for emacs going. Thanks to you & the others behind it.

Is there a plan to have pre compiled binary on Linux? Having to download a zig compiler is a bit annoying...

The Ghostty bandwagon is pretty loaded up, but iTerm is still where it's at. Recently saw some work on some iTerm work for multiple platforms from someone and it looks like it will work. Pretty excited about iTerm on Linux and Windows.

I miss Ghostty when I am on my Windows machine. Really wish it was available on Windows.

Updated comment: Ghost is better than Hugo. I am moving my site to Ghost (and because it's drudge work, assigning it to Claude).

I was sleepy and didn't realize in my original comment that Ghostty and Ghost are different.

Are the context menus hardcoded? Ghosttty is the only app on my machine that uses those horrendous rounded context menus, and because I don't use a compositor, they also have a giant black band around them. None of the config file settings seemed relevant, but maybe I missed something?

At this point, I'm really looking forward to Rex.

I've been a laggard in switching to Ghostty because I used WezTerm and wrote a plugin to customize it to my liking. I switched to Ghostty just because I got tired of nothing happening in the WezTerm land and wanted to try something different.

Rex will allow me to use my old workflow again.

I have quite enjoyed using the kitty image protocol in interesting ways.

I made a Claude code skill telling it to put a little image in the corner of the console when it does a render to see how something looks. It was quite fun telling it to draw a chicken with 5 SVG D paths and watching it iterate in the terminal.

Great to see regular updates, this is probably the first package I install on any Linux distro.

Fast and clean. I find myself using Linux when I want to focus and study.

Windows is for music creation and certain games.

> Building Ghostty from source is not recommended for most users.

Why is that? It reminds me of the XFree86 times when building from source was some unstable, fancy thing that was severely frowned upon.

Glad for an update. It’s unfortunately still missing table-stakes features for people who use primarily keyboard driven workflows. I guess I’ll stick with wezterm for another year.

Judging from kitty benchmark, 1.4 is much faster than previous version 1.3.1. Vivido[0] was the fastest terminal when i measured terminal performance a month ago. Now Ghostty is the fastest. Time to catch up.

[0] https://github.com/vivido-dev/vivido

Escape codes are the new html for browsers now called terminal emulators. What a wonderful time to be alive, but very suspicious also :D

I tried Ghostty for a few months, but found that it had the slowest launch time of all the terminals (NixOS) - we're talking seconds instead of tens of ms. Sadly, it looks like the launch improvements here are for macos.

Really happy to see all these updates.

I have a niche use case of wishing for font size support ala kitty and markdown files.

Love Ghostty!

Congrats on the release. I use libghostty-vt in my winui3 session manager and it works really well.

Really enjoy using ghostty but I've switched mostly back to konsole for only one reason: memory usage. I'll reevaluate, after reading this!

It finally fixed the tab bugs in MacOS 27 that had a beta release in June.

The update experience in Ghostty is great. I think it takes under 5 seconds from the moment you click accept update and until the new updated terminal is running.

If I am not mistaken, this is like another iTerm-like app. These tools have access to the innards of your system, like a VPN tool with access to all your connections. How do you trust, or build trust with, tools like these? How do you know whether the actor (s) behind them have malicious intent? Do you always build from an open-source project yourself? Is it a solution or the solution?

I've put libghostty in my bespoke IDEs and it's fantastic, thanks so much for all your hard work and vision.

Ghostty was using 2gb of ram the other day - I switched back to iTerm and it's now 200mb.

Libghostty is a masterpiece dude. So easy to embed, nice bindings, and it's so fast.

I tried Ghostty, but went to Kitty in the end.

Been a convert for a while it's so snappy

Im the only one no longer uses terminals apps, not even IDE's, now not even terminals.

Claude/Codex app all the way baby. What a crazy world.

Very excited for this feature

I have replaced Ghostty with Rex from Superlogical, it's great and I really like the iOS app too.

I'm sure mitchellh will check out this comment section at some point - any updates on the move away from Github? I don't really see anything that's changed, but maybe it's behind the scenes. I was pretty excited on your initial post about it but it's been a while.

My biggest gripe with Ghostty is that on Mac, window state restoration doesn't remember the previous contents of the terminal, only the working directory. I've been meaning to switch back to iTerm2 over this, but just been lazy. It can be difficult for me to remember what a tab was used for just based on the working directory.

Hmm I wss checking for updates last night actually. I really hope they dont start adding llm junk to ghostty. I really like it, but mitchel sounded like he got bit by the llm bug a few months back.

Its honestly perfect as it is, just nerd performance tweaks imo.

Now if I could only upgrade it without powering down my current Ghostty

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Wrote a VT parser once, bracketed paste edge cases ate a whole week. Respect.

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Does anyone know how to use ghostty in VS Code?

I think if you had Claude Fable build a lightweight terminal like Ghostty, you'd get a good one.