Ghostty certainly has a few innovative features up its sleeves but is it worth your time? Check out the Ghostty features and decide for yourself.

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Ghostty is a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator with standout features including simple configuration through key-value pairs, trigger sequence shortcuts similar to Vim, performable keybindings that adapt based on context, built-in image protocol support, ligature rendering for code readability, extensive built-in themes with automatic dark/light mode switching, and native UI integration using GTK4 on Linux. It supports tabs, splits, and a searchable tab overview for managing multiple terminal sessions. While borrowing concepts from Kitty, Ghostty distinguishes itself with excellent defaults that work out-of-the-box, comprehensive documentation, and platform-native implementations.

Ghostty Terminal: Never Understood the Hype Until I tried it

So what is the hype? At least compared to kitty, on Linux, does not seem to offer nothing extra. But it does eat up more VRAM, the more tabs you open and splits, the more VRAM eats, and VRAM is expensive! It was recently reduced somehow, but still huge: 6 tabs 700MB!!! compared to kitty’s 138MB constant. Tried both extensively, there is almost no difference in day-to-day usage. Ghostty renders images slower and the fonts are a tad fuzzier, but prolly can be mitigated through some setting.
So why pick one that eats up more resources? It just seems that it try to reinvent the wheel and hot water. Perhaps choose it exclusively for the hype.
Give me <code>fd</code> over <code>find</code>, <code>ripgrep</code> over classic <code>grep</code>, <code>eza</code> over <code>ls</code>, now there is a huge difference and it makes sense to use the modern alternatives. Ghostty does not.

Maybe it’s time to give it another spin but all crucial points are all taken care of for me anyhow. Multiple panes / windows? Hyprland + Tmux. Themes? Windows Terminal has themes 😅 Ligatures and fonts are a must but the point evades me. If you’re using Arch (as implied by the pacman command in the article, none of this is super difficult with kitty. But as I said. Will give it another spin and see what this is about. Maybe it’s the GPU acceleration?

I personnaly can’t use a terminal emulator without a CTRL + SHIFT + F like in konsole and I dont understant why every term emulator dont have natively