It's not an alternative to tmux, it's an alternative to the macOS Terminal.app or iTerm2.

You can run tmux inside Ghostty.

It's a terminal, not a multiplexer. Different type of product.

tmux is another terminal layer inside of any terminal.

Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.

Original post: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940

> I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.

Ha. That counts the cents, though, I assume? I didn't think Hashicorp was that big, right?

For me, Alacritty and Foot do not support ligatures, Kitty does now but I personally find the maintainers behaviour a bit abrasive. Wezterm is great but I found it noticeably slow in some (dumb) instances -- eg 144fps rendering of games, input latency and had issues on wayland at some point.

Dunno if that makes Ghostty "better" than other terminals, probably not. It just ticks the boxes of ligatures, fast, integration with wayland, simple amount of configuration to work how I want. It also seemed to have a focus on "correctness" which I appreciate. I don't use any of the tab/ssh/whatever features. I know ligatures are the new vi-vs-emacs religious war. Without that single feature-request, I'd probably just use foot. Swapping terminal also isn't that hard, it'd easily swap to something else if it gave me a reason.

I do think its reasonable to question focus on a millionaires toy with a large social presence vs other projects, helped by the somewhat --if not intentional, at least side-effecting -- hype-focused release style of Ghostty. Would it be nearly as successful if it were released anonymously at a 1.0? Probably not? Maybe? It does score highly in sort of arbitrary feature & performance benchmarks so it would probably still have a number of users without the name attached.

> All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig.

Nope, that's not it.

It's mostly because he noticed the majority of terminal applications were okay but not great. So he decides to address this by creating a cross-platform terminal app that's faster and more compatible than pretty much every existing terminal app. And has a native macOS UI written in Swift without compromising its cross-platform features.

Kind of out of nowhere, Ghostty is in the conversation of being the best terminal app available. "Best" doesn't mean the most features; but it nails speed and compatibility. (I’d love to see iTerm switch to using libghostty in the near future. That would be a killer combination!)

From "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions": [1]

Before presenting the latest results, Ghostty warrants particular attention, not only because it scored the highest among all terminals tested, but that it was publicly released only this year by Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a significant advancement. Developed from scratch in Zig, the Unicode support implementation is thoroughly correct

In 2023, Mitchell published Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators, demonstrating a commitment to understanding and implementing the fundamentals. His recent announcement of libghostty provides a welcome alternative to libvte, potentially enabling a new generation of terminals on a foundation of strong Unicode support.

[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...

Libghostty is a pretty huge contribution.

Alacritty is “barebones” and doesn’t have modern features like… tabs.

Wezterm fits the vim/emacs bill of “make it whatever you want”. I want something in between - iTerm2 for 2025. Stuff like secure input on macOS is something that is just nice - it behaves like a real platform app and not jsut the lowest common denominator loosely ported.

They say in the docs it’s not the best at anything, but it’s competitive in performance, features, and extensibility and that combo is a winner for me (personally)

This is a terrible comment. Everyone should use the terminal that works for them and anyone who wants to write a terminal should do so. Ghostty is great. I’ve heard Alacritty is great.

they are great, and I feel your concern is misplaced.

when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced, famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship

Non-profits allow projects to grow beyond hobbies. Covering costs (whether that's the expense of hosting / running the project or hiring talented people to work on it) is going to be a better incentive to keep the projects alive in the long term, meaning that people can rely on them instead of being wary that the project might become abandonware in a year.

Ever heard of the Free Software Foundation? Apache Software Foundation? FreeBSD Foundation? Linux Foundation?

Not to dismiss the generosity, but he's a billionaire.

A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.