[software] Ghostly not a terminal but terminal emulator

I’ve been using Ghostty for a while. It is one of those tools I installed out of curiosity and just kept. It was created by Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and the person (one of the people) behind Terraform, Vagrant, Vault, Consul and Nomad.

Ghostty is written primarily in Zig. The language itself is already focused on performance. It Ghostty to combine speed, modern features and a native UI without becoming complicated. Mitchell shared every step while developing the terminal. It supports GPU-accelerated rendering which I believe the most important feature, tabs, splits, ligatures, images and modern terminal protocols. A fast terminal matters more than it sounds: it sits in the feedback loop of almost everything we do, so tiny delays repeated thousands of times become noticeable. First users always express their excitement.

Once the terminal becomes fast, the bottleneck is often the shell setup itself. No flame war needed and zsh itself is not the problem. It is a shell, while Ghostty is the terminal emulator. What often becomes slow is a heavily customized zsh setup (Oh My Zsh, plugins, completion systems, hooks, etc) which can erase much of the snappy feeling you gained from a fast terminal. ; Even Oh My Zsh warns that too many plugins slow shell startup.

Mitchell has since co-founded Superlogical, where he is building a new terminal multiplexer on top of libghostty and continuing to rethink terminal-based developer workflows. Ghostty feels less like just another terminal and more like an attempt to modernize one of the oldest interfaces we still use every day. The interfaces which started to matter more nowadays. Because terminal interface is actually the most flexible and personlized interface so far.

See his latest pre-demo but very nice sneak peak video “A quick look into remote persistent sessions with Superlogical!” : https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2097424868203758046

References: Ghostty docs · Features · Source code · Hashimoto · Superlogical