Ghostty by Mitchell Hashimoto is the new hotness in the terminal emulator world. It recently came out of private beta launching publicly as 1.0. It’s similar to other GPU accelerated terminal emulators like Alacritty and Kitty, but differs in that it uses the native toolkit on macOS and Linux (GTK). For nerds it’s also interesting because it’s implemented in Zig.
Initially I dismissed Ghostty as not offering me anything over my current terminal emulator, Alacritty. Largely because of my use of the Awesome window manager. Using a tiling window manager means I have no need for tabs in my terminal emulator, and I have Awesome configured to show no window decorations on most windows. I thought this meant that Ghostty using a native UI offered me very little. However, after some recent discussions I noted that Ghostty did support two longstanding missing features in Alacritty:
- Text rendering with ligatures
- Bitmap image support, such as sixel
This prompted me to take another look at Ghostty. I set about tweaking the settings to remove all the UI chrome and get the theme to match my Alacritty config. This is the result:
Compared to Alacritty:
For some reason Ghostty is rendering PragmataPro slightly wider than Alacritty despite them both being set to the same font size.
Finally here’s a sample document in mdcat showing image and ligature support:
With the visuals out of the way, now I just need to spend some time with Ghostty to see how it compares in practice. My configuration for both terminal emulators can be found in my dotfiles repo: