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 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 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.
Its honestly perfect as it is, just nerd performance tweaks imo.
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.
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.
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.
I've tested a number of Terminal Emulators on macOS and Ghostty's rendering is always superior.
You should give 1.4 a try.
That's really cool, but I'm drawing a blank; what's it used for? Embedded terminal something?
it is all open source: https://github.com/hotaisle/hotaisle-website
cassianoleal•58m ago
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.
BorisMelnik•56m ago
xcrjm•48m ago
sigbottle•53m ago
Having having an industry player like hashimoto's superlogical driving terminal features is the extreme version of that
alsetmusic•46m ago
Can you please explain what this means? I have Ghostty installed just as a backup to use when I have terminal saturation in my default (MacOS Terminal). But other than being super responsive, I don’t know why people love it so. Perhaps I’m missing something large and compelling.
sigbottle•29m ago
A lot of other terminal emulators can expose similar reusable things (alacritty comes to mind) but libghostty is the most well supported one
B4uler5•26m ago
In terms of ghostty itself its just a highly competent use of libghostty, Mitchell’s message above about it being a tech demo is tongue and cheek, but its not far off from the truth. It is just a really solid no bells and whistles, bar excellent execution, terminal emulator.
himata4113•53m ago
paaloeye•51m ago
paaloeye•52m ago
wpm•39m ago
There was also some pretty noticeable differences in character rendering between the two with identical-as-I-could-make-them font settings.
paaloeye•35m ago
Ref: https://arne.me/blog/we-need-more-zero-config-tools
wpm•30m ago
paaloeye•20m ago
I feel like good tools should be invisible and Ghostty's lack of fully fledged Settings app is a feature, not a bug.
Just open it in Kakoune/NeoVim and change with a speed of thoughts. Never used any third-party Settings apps though.
Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858121
slowin•50m ago
paride5745•48m ago
ravenstine•45m ago
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.
mixmastamyk•7m ago
Also the konsole context menu and default toolbar are a mess.
micromacrofoot•43m ago
prinny_•42m ago
hxugufjfjf•41m ago
cassianoleal•31m ago
To me the point of Konsole is that it works well, plus it's already there. Ghostty I need to make an effort to have it, however small it is, and I'm just trying to understand what I'd be missing if I didn't.
hexasquid•40m ago
cassianoleal•30m ago
the_mitsuhiko•26m ago
lioeters•38m ago
> 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.
reissbaker•38m ago
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.
flohofwoe•37m ago
lioeters•24m ago
Cool! How fun, I'm a big fan of your work and will enjoy learning from this project too. (:
bombcar•36m ago
tetraodonpuffer•35m ago
diath•31m ago
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.
ada-h00k•31m ago
pritambaral•20m ago
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.
adrian_b•17m ago
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.