Posted by thorel 1/10/2026
A user came along and provided a reliable reproduction for me (last night) that allowed me to find and fix the issue. Simultaneously they found the same thing and produced a similar fix, which also helped validate both our approaches. So, we were able to move forward. I said in the linked comment that I believed the leak existed, just couldn't find it.
It also was fairly limited in impact. As far as Ghostty bugs go, the number of upvotes the bug report had (9) is very small. The "largest" in the title is with regards to the size of the leak in bytes, not the size of the leak in terms of reach.
As extra data to support this, this bug has existed for at least 3 years (since the introduction of this data structure in Ghostty during the private beta). The first time I even heard about it in a way where I can confidently say it was this was maybe 3 or 4 months ago. It was extremely rare. I think the recent rise in popularity of Claude Code in particular was bringing this to the surface more often, but never to the point it rose to a massively reported issue.
Like I said, this bug has existed for 3 years at this point and Ghostty is likely used by hundreds of thousands if not a million+ people daily (we don't have any analytics at all but have some side signals based on terminal reports from 3rd party CLIs). Trust me when I say that when there is a widespread issue, we hear it MUCH more loudly. :)
In the meantime they apparently got one (edit: per their sibling comment they got it yesterday evening) and were finally able to figure out the issue.
edit: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/10244 is where it was cracked.
As you can see, there's no hint or evidence they even are on HN let alone saw that discussion.
I have never found myself in the situation where my terminal emulator would be too slow and I‘m using it for the majority of my day-to-day work.
I honestly never ran into a situation where I would habe blamed the terminal emulator for being too slow.
and once you get used to things being that fast, it’s hard to go back (analogous to what people say about high-refresh screens/monitors)
all that said the speed of the default mac terminal (and other emulators I tried) was always fine for me, performance was not why I switched to Ghostty
I first started to understand and notice update rates and responsiveness as a gamer playing 1st person shooters.
I hate (ok, I find it a bit jarring) the jerky scrolling of a phone in battery save mode limited to 60(?) FPS. It’s so obviously not connected to your touch anymore.
In terminals it’s things like the responsiveness fuzzy finders and scrolling that I really notice.
I turn off animations everywhere I can.
It’s not impossible to use something slower, but when everything feels instant it’s just much more pleasant, smoother, and feels more productive as a result of the computer working at whatever speed my brain does.
> Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.
> In all categories, I am not trying to claim that Ghostty is the best (i.e. the fastest, most feature-rich, or most native). But when I set out to create Ghostty, I felt all terminals made you choose at most two of these categories. I wanted to create a terminal that was competitive in all three categories and I believe Ghostty achieves that goal.
> Before diving into the details, I also want to note that Ghostty is a passion project started by Mitchell Hashimoto (that's me!). It's something I work on in my free time and is a labor of love. Please don't forget this when interacting with the project. I'm doing my best to make something great along with the lovely contributors, but it's not a full-time job for any of us.