Comment by ravenstine
17 hours ago
There's always gonna be something that's better, faster, bigger, badder, stronger, thicker, firmer, etc., and terminals really aren't one of those things where I am interested in exhaustively testing all of them to find the truly greatest one. A terminal is also one of those things where if you find one that is perfectly adequate then there's little motivation to even bother using trying one. And there's the whole "devil you know" aspect. The only reason I rarely try a different terminal is if the stock terminal on whatever OS I'm using lacks some basic niceties that should be expected in the year 2026.
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.
Funny, I won’t use a term emulator unless it has a good GUI config. Even SGI and Windows Command prompt had them in the 90s.
Also the konsole context menu and default toolbar are a mess.
I also thought like that, but you only to set some defaults and you're ready to go. If you still prefer a GUI there are online generators. Nowdays you can also vibecode them, they are very simple and any LLM will do it right
If you have to see them, they aren’t defaults. It’s bad enough that Windows Terminal doesn’t expose its full configuration and forces you to edit the config by hand for more advanced stuff. Feels like a step backwards when something like iTerm 2 gives you access to all settings in a (admittedly kinda crappy) GUI. This also kinda begs the question why there’s not a /TUI/ configuration manager shipped…
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There are mature emulators for decades now, why go backwards? I guess there are a few tiny features that might be useful, and am open to them. But a new project needs to be strictly better, not two steps forward, one step back.
Ghostty is getting there though, and today is a milestone, not complaining too loudly.
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The lack of a config GUI in ghostty used to bother me, but to be honest now I just describe to Claude what I want to change and it does it. It would still be nice to have one eventually but I can see the argument for deprioritizing it.