Comment by sigbottle
19 hours ago
The terminal ecosystem needs to change, and these terminals support a lot of cool features. Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth, Kitty graphics, Wezterm and its mux domains & lua config, lots of cool ideas there.
Having having an industry player like hashimoto's superlogical driving terminal features is the extreme version of that
> Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth
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.
I assume the quote is referring to libghostty. In which case a lot of different tools like vs code, Emacs, Gvim, Intellij and other IDEs, even web consoles on stuff like Azure essentially use and reimplement the same core, the idea behind libghostty is to replace those with a common component where long term development can better support the needs of all terminals.
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 that uses libghostty.
Terminal state machine parsing is a very tricky thing, especially when you have people defining arbitrary protocols to interact with it. So having one implementation simplifies the development a lot. Of course this buys you into their ecosystem and whatever ghostty specifically supports etc.
A lot of other terminal emulators can expose similar reusable things (alacritty comes to mind) but libghostty is the most well supported one
It being super responsive is the reason I switched to it. MacOS terminal had issues keeping up with Claude Code. It would frequently be super slow rendering the text output or sometimes just stop altogether.
When looking at options I looked at speed and simplicity. Ghostty fit the bill but I did evaluate iterm as well. Excellent terminal but too many features for what I was looking for. I live in the terminal but am not a Terminal App power user if that makes sense.
So, it really comes down to what you want and what your workflow looks like. Ghostty has been flawless for me the past 9months. It gets out of the way and just works really well.
Really? Claude Code is buggy but not very demanding in terms of rendering -- are you sure the perf issues were local?
3 replies →
> The terminal ecosystem needs to change
What is your justification for this statement? Why does it need to change, and what does it need to change to? Personally, I've not felt this (and I spend a lot of time in the terminal). Fish shell and Byobu give me everything I've ever wanted.
Like the poster you were replying to, I don't understand what these new terminal emulators bring to the table, other than potentially more resource usage.
I feel that there's something here that I'm missing (ghostty is clearly popular, so it must bring something both new and useful to the table), but I'm genuinely not sure what that is.
Why would a terminal multiplexer need an entire company behind it? Especially since it looks identical to the many other vibe coded alternatives (including my own lol).