Ghostty is a terminal emulator written in Zig with an emphasis on performance – looking forward to trying this!
After nearly two years of development and private beta testing1, I’m excited to share that Ghostty 1.0 will be publicly released in December 2024 as an open-source project under the MIT license.
This has been privately developed for several years now, but was released as OSS:
Arch already has a real package. Note, this is in the main feeds, not AUR.
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/ghostty/
Blog article:
https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
I’ll report back after using it a bit …
This is one first significant tools written in Zig (most are written in Rust these days), so interested in how it is working out. From the above blog article:
Zig has been an absolute joy to work with. I have fun writing Zig every single day and that fun hasn’t diminished a bit over two years. The build system is fantastic, the community is amazing, and the core maintainers are brilliant. My excitement is well known and I’ve also put my money where my mouth is by sponsoring the Zig Software Foundation.
The split between shared core written in Zig and platform-specific GUIs has also been a success. I’ve been able to effortless integrate platform-native experiences into Ghostty while keeping over 90% of the code shared.
The beta community has also had no problem contributing to the project. I think this shows that despite being a new, niche language, Zig is easily approachable and productive for new contributors. This is great news for the future of the project.
One thing I don’t like about Ghostty compared to Alacrity is the size of the bar at the top, which I don’t really need as I use Zellij instead of tabs in the terminal:
However, setting the following in ~/config/ghostty/config gets rid of it:
gtk-titlebar = false
The latest version of Ghostty completely gets rid of any bar at the top of the screen with the above config item – that is nice in that gives and extra line of text.
I also figured out how to click on links in Ghostty inside Zellij – Shift+CTRL+mouse works. Outside of Zellij, CTRL-click works. This was a blocker for me using Ghostty, so back to trying it for awhile.
I was not able to use Option + left|right arrows for switching tabs in zellij and was one of hurdles for me. Luckily found a way to get this sorted by adding following to config
macos-option-as-alt = true
keybind = alt+left=unbind
keybind = alt+right=unbind