Ghostty: 54K‑Star Terminal Faster Than Alacritty, Richer Than iTerm2, Beginner‑Friendly

Project Overview

Ghostty is an open‑source terminal emulator authored by Mitchell Hashimoto, co‑founder of HashiCorp. As of version 1.3 it has 149 contributors, 2 676 commits, and roughly 54.3 k stars on GitHub. The project aims to resolve the “two‑way dilemma” of existing terminals by combining the extreme speed of Alacritty, the rich feature set of iTerm2, and native cross‑platform behavior. Anthropic recommends Ghostty as the preferred terminal for Claude Code.

Installation

macOS (recommended): brew install --cask ghostty Arch/Manjaro: sudo pacman -S ghostty Ubuntu/Debian: install via PPA or software center

Other Linux distributions (Flatpak): flatpak install flathub org.ghostty.Ghostty Linux builds require GTK 4.14+ and libadwaita 1.5+. Older systems must upgrade or use the Flatpak package.

Configuration

Configuration file location: ~/.config/ghostty/config. The file uses a simple key = value syntax.

Font size: font-size = 14 (recommended range 12‑16)

Background color: background-color = #1E1E1E Quick terminal size: quick-terminal-size = 40% Hot‑reload is enabled; after editing the file press Cmd+Shift+, on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+, on Linux to apply changes instantly.

Core Features

Quick Terminal – a global shortcut (e.g., Ctrl+Alt+T) brings up the terminal over any application and hides it without terminating running processes.

Split Screen – horizontal split with Cmd+D (macOS) or Ctrl+D (Linux); vertical split with Cmd+Shift+D / Ctrl+Shift+D; switch splits via Cmd+Tab / Ctrl+Tab.

Command Palette – invoked with Cmd+Shift+P (macOS) or Ctrl+Shift+P (Linux), works like VS Code’s palette to search for actions such as “move_tab”.

Shell Integration – automatic injection scripts for bash, zsh, fish, etc., providing Shift+Up/Down to jump between command prompts, automatic working‑directory inheritance for new tabs, and Option+Click / Alt+Click to place the cursor precisely.

SSH Support – when connecting to a remote host Ghostty transfers its terminfo ( xterm-ghostty) so colors and keys work correctly without manual setup.

Advanced Options

Background image: add background-image = /path/to/image.png and optionally background-opacity = 0.8.

GUI progress bar: supports OSC 9;4 sequences, allowing programs such as Zig CLI or systemd tasks to display native progress bars at the top of the window (first macOS terminal to do so).

libghostty: a C‑compatible library extracted from the core, embeddable in other languages or WebAssembly.

Limitations

Windows has no native client yet; usage is limited to WSL.

On macOS the GPU‑accelerated rendering consumes more power than the built‑in Terminal.app, which may affect battery life.

Linux requires GTK 4.14+; older distributions must upgrade or use Flatpak to avoid launch failures.

Repository

Read‑only mirror: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty. Official site: https://ghostty.org.