Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships

Ghostty is more interesting than it sounds, for several reasons: who wrote it, what it does, and the language it was written in are all more unusual than the ostensibly simple task it performs.

Ghostty is a terminal emulator. In 2025, of course, lots of people never need a terminal emulator, and good for them. If you use macOS or Linux and do use one, then Ghostty might be worth a look. (And if you're a Windows type and use one, it's coming to that OS at some point.) Even if you don't use one, some things about this little app are quite interesting anyway.

<

According to the blog post announcing the imminent release of the first complete version:

The Register mentioned Ghostty in passing a year ago, when its author left Hashicorp, which he co-founded - thus its name. Developer Mitchell Hashimoto is quite a high-profile name in the enterprise IT world. He co-created Vagrant, which we looked at in 2022 - it's a handy little tool that automates the creation of virtual machines. It did well and led to Hashicorp being founded and winning VC backing, as The Reg reported nearly a decade ago.

More recently, though, there's been controversy. A few months before Hashimoto left the company, Hashicorp controversially changed the license on its formerly FOSS tools. The license change led to the OpenTF fork of Hashicorp's Terraform, which was picked up by the Linux Foundation and renamed OpenTofu. Neither the controversy nor the fork stopped IBM offering $6.4 billion for the company, although that deal is still being scrutinized.

None of this is directly relevant to his hobby project, but on one hand that might be why his name could be familiar, and on the other hand, there is demonstrable history of Hashimoto's small convenience-driven projects turning into very big deals.

Another interesting aspect is that Ghostty is mainly implemented in the Zig programming language. Zig is one of several 21st century languages that aims to offer an alternative to plain old C, and it's cropped up on The Register before in the context of another such language, Drew DeVault's Hare.

As for the program itself, well, it's a terminal emulator. You might be forgiven for thinking this is very much a solved problem, but Ghostty brings some interesting new wrinkles. Hashimoto has a sub-site of his homepage given over to the app and has written at some length about how it works, including six "devlogs" that go into depth about how it works, while remaining interesting and readable.

To summarize some of the good bits, it's very quick, thanks in part to use of GPU acceleration, as Devblog 006 explains. Although just displaying screens of text isn't a very demanding job for any modern computer, doing it fast thanks to relatively simple, clean code has a less-obvious benefit. It's not that it's much faster than your existing terminal app; it probably is, and we're sure that there are some folks out there who can tell, and to whom this really matters. The bigger point is that it uses less processor power while doing it.

This is a phrase that - however unfairly - somehow makes our heart sink writing it, but there are terminal emulator benchmarking tools out there now. Our life is much too short, so we did a simpler test. We compared Ghostty with the stock macOS Terminal on the latest Sequoia, and ran htop set to a refresh rate of ten times a second. Both handled it fine, as we expected. But in the list of processes, Terminal.app itself used more CPU time displaying the htop output than htop itself. In Ghostty, htop used more CPU. That's a practical demo of why being faster is good.

Considerable attention has gone into both inputting and outputting text. It has full support for both entering text in multiple writing systems, paying attention to multiple IMEs, or input method editors - including Japanese and Chinese. Ghostty has its own font-rendering code, which means not only can it accurately display all sorts of fonts, scripts, alphabets, and so on, but also things like ligatures between letters. If, like The Reg FOSS desk, you're only really comfortable reading two or three of the simpler alphabetic scripts, you might not even notice, but this kind of thing is hugely important in some human writing systems. It can also handle multiple tiled terminal sessions in a single window, without any extensions. Rather than emulating some physical terminal that nobody has manufactured in decades, Ghostty emulates xterm itself, the grandparent of all terminal emulators for Unix-like OSes.

It's currently available in two forms: a universal binary for Apple Mac computers (meaning that it runs natively on both x86-64 and Arm64 Macs), and as a Linux package for various distributions. We tried both flavors, which highlighted issues that we suspect will affect quite a few others. On macOS, Ghostty requires macOS 13 or above, which is newer than this vulture's 2015 iMac can handle. On Linux, it installed and ran perfectly on Ubuntu 24.10 - but our test machine runs the Unity desktop, and Ghostty is a modern Gtk app. It works fine, but it lacks title and menu bars; it uses GNOME's "Client Side Decorations," which among other things means it has no minimize, maximize, or close buttons. You can use keyboard controls to move, resize, and close its window perfectly fine, but it looks out of place on a more traditional desktop.

It's an interesting program for us in several ways. For one, it improves on something that most of us didn't think had any more room for improvement. That's impressive. Unlike some other next-generation terminal apps, it's cross-platform and feels like a native Mac or Linux app on both. It also doesn't have any integration features with so-called "AI" tools, or LLM bots as we call them around these parts. Good thing, too. On the other hand, this jaded old keyboard-centric vulture would prefer a more traditional UI with traditional window furniture, so on that basis, it won't be our new default.

Ghostty 1.0 was released shortly after Christmas, with vulnerability CVE-2024-56803 discovered on December 31, 2024. It was fixed almost immediately in version 1.0.1. Both Mac and Linux versions are available on the download page. ®