20250108
I, like every other pseudo nerd on the internet, am in the midst of playing with ghostty. Why? Because the internet won't shut up about it and I'm a sucker for "new thing does old thing but better, I promise"
But I'm not sure there's any better involved at all. For one, Ghostty is the slowest to start terminal emulator on my system. It is noticeably slow to start up. The promise of speed, therefore, must be 'while running' and when it's running it's perfectly normal -no faster feeling that anything else I use.
I should probably mention what I use and how, for reference: I'm on usually Arch running sway, though my 'gaming' pc is Arch with gnome. For terminal emulators I think I'm as boring as it gets: I have used and liked 'gnome-terminal', 'xfce4-terminal', and most recently I have been running 'foot'. On the Mac side I have a final gen intel mac mini and I guess I use iTerm2 on it when I need a term emulator.
I'm honestly not sure what benefits Ghostty has. When it's working well, it behaves like any other terminal emulator I use. When things go wrong it's often in the same way that other term emulators go wrong. ...I should probably list issues I've found with it. Starting with bugs: you can;t file a bug report, instead you need to file a discussion. This might actually be a good thing -the way of the future and something that aids in development but, in combination with the invite only beta and a few other things it feels off-putting to an old user like me -this may be the point and may, in the long run help the project. It looks so bad with that header bar thing -new tabs keep that giant header bar on top...this may be a gnome thing but I think I had some similar issues under sway? You can disable the header bar by killing all decorations, you also then lose mouse access to some functions. Another issue I have is that you need to restart the thing, a lot until you et it configured the way you want -too any changes require a full term restart. It seems like a MacOS first terminal -there seem to be quite a few settings that are MacOS only. The opposite might also be true but my usage reveals more 'that's only for mac'. I'm not sure at all how I feel about built in multiplexing -this could be really cool for some people but, being an old user, I lean towards older Unix ideals (I've never touched Unix, just grew up with Linux users talking about Unix philosophy) -but that might be very, very, very stupid of me. I can imagine some really great arguments for integrating multiplexing into a terminal emulator. And I'm all in on systemd -so...
I'd better tell you what I like about this -and there is lots to like: it's open. That alone is worth so much to me. It's new -I think we should encourage new approaches to old problems -there are exceptions and we could talk about choice paradox|paralysis and fragmentation, but i like that this exists. I've suspicious of and envious of the hype -I think I lean towards it being a good thing -it may keep it active and healthy. It has many sane defaults and mostly look good ootb.
I'm genuinely happy this exists and it's my default terminal emulator on two of my main machines for now. I want to really use it for a month or two before making any big decisions