Ghostty 1.0 Released, A New GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator
Ghostty 1.0 Released, A New GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator
Meet Ghostty 1.0: The GPU-accelerated terminal emulator exits beta after two years, challenging Kitty and Alacritty with its speed and features.
We need to stop this usage of proprietary MS GitHub + Discord in free software. It completely undermines the philosophy.
The rampant use of Discord in FLOSS project is really disheartening. To join yet another Discord channel to receive any kind of support or discussions around the project, is off-putting.
Discord is the worst. The siloing of tons of information that should be publicly searchable and accessible via a public forum, but instead it's siloed off into this closed wall with shitty search.
I actually wish Lemmy was better searchable as well. I think Lemmy could be way better and drive adoption if it had a cross instance search engine / indexer.
You're not alone with your opinion.
Indeed.
What is the deal with getting gpu acceleration into a terminal emulator of all things? Of all the innovations that we could use, faster drawing of text doesn't feel like it should be a priority.
GPU rendered text interfaces are pretty ubiquitous already. You can find that in IDEs, browsers, apps and GUIs of OSs. Drawing pixels is still a job the GPU excels at. No matter whether it's just text. So I don't see a point why we shouldn't apply that to terminal emulators as well.
That's what I would have said till I tried using a TUI epub reader. The jankiness of line-level scrolling (rather than pixel-level like in a GUI app) is all but a deal breaker.
I was then most surprised to discover that terminal emulators with this amazing cutting-edge technology (smooth scrolling) do not even exist.
My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I'm not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.
I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.
GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator
So is Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm, and even iTerm.
The README's About section[0] sheds no light on what sets Ghostty apart from the competition, while using vague terms and marketing hyperboles.
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty?tab=readme-ov-file#about
From the website linked in the post:
- Windows, Tabs, and Splits: Manage multiple terminal windows, each with several tabs and splits. Better yet, it is all rendered via native UI elements.
- GPU-Accelerated Rendering: Employs Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux for efficient, high-speed rendering.
- Hundreds of Themes: Swap between light and dark modes automatically, or choose from a vast library of visually appealing themes.
- Ligatures and Grapheme Clustering: Shows ligatures flawlessly, handles multi-codepoint emoji properly, and accurately renders Arabic and Hebrew (in left-to-right mode).
- Kitty Graphics Protocol Support: Let terminal applications display inline images for a richer visual experience.
It also says it's cross platform (macOS and Linux) and has configurable shortcuts with what they believe are sensible defaults.
Although at least Alacritty already has all of these features (very different “sensible” defaults, though) and is also available on Windows so I'm not sold.
I tried it, and it worked well when I worked locally. But I can't use it to SSH into my server, a lot of things just don't work.
You can do something like this:
TERM=xterm-256color ssh user@hostYou could also install or copy over the term files or something. I can't recall. But it's the same as getting kitty to work which has more information online.
4k 120 fps ?
And HDR
Running CDDA
We are reaching autistic levels never seen before
Finally a gpu accelerated Terminal emulator with tabbing.
Kitty has tabs
ohhh, I didnt know that thanks but Ghostty has Zero config by default which i like (Edit: maybe I might use wezterm)
Alacritty has windows and tabs.
Idk how to activate it (And my distro Cachyos uses a custom alacrity config
Pardon my ignorance, is the default terminal that comes with my PopOS also a "terminal emulator" and Ghostty is a replacement for that?
Yes. But it doesn't have to replace your default terminal emulator. You can have multiple and use any of them.
Unless it is trying to actually look cool like "cool retro terminal" or something, I fail to see how the point. I don't recall ever in the history of my terminal use ever thinking "man, this terminal emulator is so slow!" I mean, really... 120fps 4k terminals. Neat I guess?
That’s not what GPU acceleration is used for.
This. If you hadn't written it ...
I'm not against it, but another factor that we should check in a terminal emulator (as a tool where you run everything from) is the system requirements.
I'm using urxvt and that's so easy on the system, it starts instantly. I can open multiple instances without worrying about the system resources.
I believe it uses X.org's text rendering. X.org uses OpenGL under the hood. It's not CPU rendered.
Alacrity felt bulkier when I tried. I will try this too though.
What would be the best foss for Android ?
Do you mean best FOSS terminal for Android? To my knowledge, there's only really Termux.