Ghostty is the new rage and I’m all in for it

Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.

As the year comes to an end, Mitchell Hashimoto has released his new terminal emulator, Ghostty.

It’s minimal and fast.

It’s difficult to justify changing terminal emulators. In part because once you set it up you mostly don’t need to tune it that much, and in part because they all mostly do the same, right?

Ghostty has been surrounded with an elitism and hype which it’s difficult to ignore. I was in the camp of thinking that it would be just as any other terminal emulator. There are many great emulators as of today, but I was still working with iTerm2. To me, it was the standard replacement for the base macOS terminal, and I thought this was still the case as of today.

Even back then I was not really interested in using iTerm, but the need for a nice colorset for my neovim configuration made me make the change. I also enjoyed not having native titlebars in the terminal. But that was it, no need for anything special.

But boy, once you fire up ghostty for the first time, you really notice the difference. I thought I was being picky, but if you put it side by side, ghostty really starts up Instantly. It really makes you wonder why not everything runs that fast.

I noticed that my terminal was a bit slow in the past, and I even tried to remove fat from my oh-my-zsh configuration to no avail. In the end I assumed it was something I had to live with, and that’s what I’ve been doing until today.

But not anymore, with a few lines of code I already have ghostty as everything was setup in iTerm. Even better, because now I can sync my config between machines, and I don’t need to manually configure anything in iTerm with the mouse.

I’m really enjoying ghostty and I hope I won’t change terminals again. Give it a try and take a look at its website, is really good.