Ghostty is simpler and faster
Haven’t gone back since.
I suppose my accolade is that Ghostty just does what I want without hunting through config screens and managing file edits.
No, it doesn't.
What you're describing is a Gnome Terminal issue.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697475
But OSC 7 is a standard supported across virtually all widely used terminal emulators anyway, so configuring your shell to emit it is a sensible thing to do regardless.
I have it reuse the same directory in a new pane. And my home directory in a new tab.
iTerm just feel less buggy. For example I was running Claude in a container the other day and the slash command complete wasn’t rendering properly with Ghostty but worked perfectly fine with iTerm.
I want to switch to Ghostty because I prefer how simple Ghostty is overall and I think the project itself is very cool and an important piece of software (libghostty) but it doesn’t quite get there for _for my use cases_.
If you are interested, please DM. I am happy to chat about it.
libghostty-vt 1.0 is here. libghostty is a portable, high-performance C library for terminal emulation, extracted directly from the core of Ghostty.And that is with me and everyone else knew it was coded in Zig in the first place. Had anyone not knew what Ghostty were I seriously think they would have thought it was a "C Library".
But I wasn't entirely sure, but Mitchell kept evangelizing it and his podcast interviews sealed it for me. I was going to use libghostty, along with Kitty Graphics Protocol to realize my vision.
It's been a pretty amazing 9 months. I've been as deep as assembly language trampolines and garbage collector debugging and as high as fixing cursive connections in Arabic script, with a lot of BubbleTea and hardening in between.
Here's some of the libghostty warez:
ntwebterm [1] , originally Coder's ghostty-web, is an xterm.js compatible browser embedder. I've added WebGPU rendering and soooo many UX enhancements; I finally forked it to keep it cohesive with our platform.
booba [2] uses ntwebterm to remote Golang programs over WebTransport or embed them in browser. All the demos on NimbleTerminal.com use it.
ntrecord [3] uses go-libghostty to make an improved version of Charm's vhs. The most important difference is it supports Kitty Graphics Protocol, but of course has all the compatibility that libghostty provides.
gloss [4] is 'less' for graphics. The hardest part of 'gloss' is forgetting to type 'less'. If you have Rex, run "gloss skill install rex" and you'll have a new "grex" command to view files in a side block, also command-shift-G will open a Gloss block. There's too much to write about, including how agents can use it... coincidentally released a new version yesterday.
I made a Golang 3D game engine that targets Kitty Graphics [5]. Started at 4fps but got it to 120fps! And once you are there, you can add yummies like Gaussian Splatting.
Our fuzzing dash/orchestrator [6] uses this platform in several ways, including OSC 7501-driven web GUI via booba.
Everything in the Nimble Terminal Platform is layered, so you can grab the parts that fit your needs.
Thank you Mitchell and the libghostty team for empowering and inspiring us!!!
[1] https://nimbleterminal.dev/ntwebterm
[2] https://nimbleterminal.dev/booba
[3] https://nimbleterminal.dev/ntrecord
[4] https://nimbleterminal.github.io/gloss
What I'm working on now is close to what libghostty enables: a daemon that runs foot's terminal core headless, so programs keep running when the app quits or crashes, and windows come back with their scrollback. Next I want to attach to sessions on other machines over SSH.
If you thought building a terminal emulator too hard to add for your project, you no longer have an excuse, libghostty makes it very easy to implement