Comment by alkh

5 days ago

I have been pretty happy with Alacritty for a while but just tried Ghostty and am a little bit mind-blown. The fact that it has a built-in theme picker is insanely convenient for people working on multiple computers at the same time(so the same theme might not work everywhere).

Overall, it literally looks like a better Alacritty alternative. The creator(s) did a great job!

40 comments

alkh

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mort96  5 days ago

The only thing I'm missing from ghostty is scrollback search. It's planned AFAIU, I hope it gets there eventually. Otherwise, ghostty has been pretty good.

(I know you can fake scrollback search with tmux. It's not the same.)

  • klooney  5 days ago

    There seems to be a contingent that just doesn't use scroll back search, which I find kind of baffling.

    • __float  5 days ago

      There are a ton of people who _immediately_ open tmux/zellij/etc. when they're doing anything in the terminal. This means you use its backscroll and search feature, and you wouldn't notice.

      @mitchellh seems to rely on the Ghostty feature to dump scrollback to a file, and edit/search over that.

      I found it a bit too inconvenient when using remote systems frequently, though. (If I'm missing a trick, I'd love to use Ghostty! But I'm just not a fan of multiplexers.)

    • sevg  5 days ago

      I’ve never used scrollback search, and it was a discovery for me that there’s a contingent that are very vocal in their demands for scrollback search.

      I can see why someone would feel attached to this feature though.

      Mostly I’m looking forward to seeing it implemented so I can stop reading complaints about this being missing in every thread about ghostty!

      2 replies →

    • bigstrat2003  5 days ago

      Honestly, I had never even heard of it before this very thread. It doesn't seem all that useful to me, but I don't truthfully know how much or how little I would use it in practice.

      2 replies →

  • nusaru  5 days ago

    Relevant GitHub issue: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

    • Imustaskforhelp  5 days ago

      > To be completely clear, it’s not on the “IMMEDIATE” roadmap (as noted in the prior comment). It’s absolutely on the roadmap and I even already started some it in a branch. But as a passion project, we prioritize working on whatever we want and this isn’t currently the priority. It’s high on the list but not like.. next release (“immediate”) priority at the time of this comment.

      I mean I can respect that, personally it isn't as a big of deal with me so I use ghostty on my mac but I would still think that I would advocate ghostty only after disclosing this to anyone to be really honest.

      1 reply →

OberstKrueger  5 days ago

The first time I went through the theme picker, I was tickled to see a theme I had made years ago included. Realized later it was due to it including all of the themes from iTerm2 Color Schemes automatically.

It made for a more fun first experience with a terminal emulator than I expected to have.

seanw444  5 days ago

Same here. Any replacement I moved to needed to have content centering, where the margin around the cells is equal in both dimensions when the cells don't fit perfectly into the window. Kinda crazy that it's not a feature in a lot of terminals I checked over the years. I wouldn't even consider myself OCD, but it drove me nuts until I found a terminal that let me do it.

chrysoprace  5 days ago

I've always wanted to like Alacritty but they've had an open issue to support ligatures since 2017 and they're not in a rush to implement them.

Now the only feature I need in Ghostty is Windows support.

  • Imustaskforhelp  5 days ago

    > Now the only feature I need in Ghostty is Windows support.

    I use ghostty on my mac but have you forgot about ctrl + f to find things support in ghostty (I don't think it has ctrl f support iirc right?)

    • chrysoprace  5 days ago

      I'm always running tmux so it's not typically a feature I look for, but as you mention it doesn't seem to trigger a find for terminal scrollback. Wezterm doesn't do this either so maybe that's an iTerm thing. I always assume Ctrl keybindings will trigger emacs mode shortcuts in the tty.

      Update: Windows Terminal doesn't do it either.

      5 replies →

hnlmorg  5 days ago

I thought built in theme pickers were the norm…?