There are hundreds of terminal emulators out there for both Mac and Linux devices, with fan favorites being the likes of iTerm2 and Alacritty. However, Ghostty is a new terminal emulator that has just left beta, and it has a few features that alternatives don't while focusing on being fast and responsive. It might not be your next permanent terminal emulator, but it's one to keep an eye on.

For the basic premise of Ghostty, I'll simply quote the lead developer behind the project and what his goals were.

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.

Ghostty is free and open source

And it looks amazing

If you want to try out Ghostty, it's a completely free and open-source application that you can start using right away. It runs on Mac and Linux and is designed to replace the built-in terminal emulator on your device. Ghostty's features include:

• GPU acceleration using Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux
• Native tabs and Splits
• Extensive theme customization
• Fast and responsive user interface

Ghostty is written in Zig, and its goal is to be the best terminal emulator on the market right now as a drop-in replacement for the default option you have installed. While options such as Alacritty might be better for your specific use case, Ghostty's developer says that the goal is to be the best-existing terminal emulator and that there's still work to be done.

If you're upset at the lack of Windows support, rest assured that developer Mitchell Hashimoto has already said that support will come in the future. It's not exactly a priority right now as terminal emulators are typically more of a power-user feature, and power-users are more likely to use Mac and Linux than they are to use Windows.

As for how Ghostty manages its performance, it uses vsync and supports variable refresh rates over DisplayLink. It uses the integrated GPU instead of a dedicated or external GPU, and non-focused rendering threads will be moved to E-cores. Finally, if the window is obscured entirely, it will slow down rendering as it's not in view by the user.

Ghostty's theme options are incredible

There's a lot of room for change

Ghostty is greatly configurable, and its looks are modified by changing a text file that you can access from within the application. The configuration I'm using in the above screenshot (running btop and neofetch in two separate tabs) is the following:

There are a number of keybinds you can use that come enabled by default, and you can create your own in the Ghostty configuration file, too.

If you want to make your own Ghostty configuration file, there's a great unofficial tool called "Ghostty Config" on GitHub that you can use. It'll bring you through most of the settings you can change, and you can then export a configuration to put in Ghostty.

Ghostty is still in active development, and this is only the first version of it that's publicly available. I'll be using it for a long time to come, and it's only going to get better from here.