Hacker Remix

Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming

88 points by GhiGt 2 days ago | 31 comments

Ennea 2 days ago

I'm missing WezTerm from that comparison image/slide posted in the article. Been using WezTerm for almost two years now I think, and I could not be happier. Best terminal emulator hands down.

nine_k 2 days ago

I second this. WezTerm is very fast (much faster than anything libvterm-based), very featureful (comparable to Kitty), and very configurable (comparable to Vim, if not Emacs itself). Showing fonts the way I like (and not he way macOS defaults to): check. Sending complex key combos as custom sequences: check. Palettes, mouse support, system clipboard support: all check. Selection and search mode: check. Linux, MacOS, and even Windows support: all check!

I wish Ghostty all the luck, because the current state of terminal emulators is a pretty high bar to clear.

paranoidxprod 2 days ago

Looking forward to this! Had been lurking in the discord for a while but never talked much so I never was able to get a beta key. The Terminal Inspector seems super cool and is what I'm most excited to try out. Seems like it'd be really useful for Bubble Tea [0] apps which I've been having run writing.

[0] https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

Kovah 2 days ago

Can someone explain why iTerm is listed as "not fast" here? iTerm has been my primary terminal for over a decade and I keep coming back after trying alternatives like Warp, Hyper or Alacritty. And speed or snappy-ness were never an issue with iTerm.

nine_k 2 days ago

Because iTerm is not fast.

Try opening a fullscreen terminal and cat a long file. Add search / highlighting, repeat. Type something really fast; sometimes you can even notice the input lag, especially if you enable ligatures and other features.

Install WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty; try the same.

It's not that iTerm is not fast enough for most daily work. It's not that iTerm's feature set is not great. But there are faster alternatives, and in many cases, the difference is pronounced.

ktosobcy 2 days ago

> Type something really fast;

I just opened iTerm and started bashing keys on my keyboard randomly and there wasn't any lag. For me, for all intents and purposed it just fast.

Cat a long-ish (10k lines, I know it's not that log but don't have anything longer at hand) and search with highlight and there wasn't any lag (and I'm quite alergic to it).

BUT. I don't have any fancy shell prompt nor ligatures (don't see any point) and there is a warning that enabling said ligatures will impact performance...

nine_k 2 days ago

See e.g. https://www.lkhrs.com/blog/2022/07/terminal-latency/

On a slower machine, 100ms latency is achievable, which becomes perceptible (not yet annoying). Output speed can be visibility sluggish if you add too much highlighting and stuff.

I haven't touched iTerm for several years; maybe the modern versions are intrinsically faster, and modern hardware is definitely much.faster, so this could have become imperceptible.

ktosobcy 1 day ago

Hmm... there was a time lime 3-4 years ago where there was some slowdown (but I was on beta) but it was fixed.

Nowadays I'm on MBP M1 (so already "older-ish" machine) and it works fine. I definitely notice latency when I'm connecting to a machine with ping over ~70ms so I assume that if I don't notice any delay then latency is low (?)

drcongo 2 days ago

I can't get it to go slow either, I have a fancy prompt (Starship) and nerdfonts.

AnonymousPlanet 2 days ago

Can I click on paths to have them opened in my editor of choice? That's the killer feature that always brings me back to iTerm: clicking on paths in the output of various command line tools to directly jump to the line in e.g. source code.

nine_k 2 days ago

How would it work under ssh?

AnonymousPlanet 2 days ago

iTerm runs a command with filename, line number, pwd etc. as parameters when you click a path. You can use so called shell extensions to let iTerm add hostname and user to those parameters. I usually grab those and point my editor to the appropriate share or sshfs mount. With vim you can seamlessly use rsync or scp.