7mo ago

Ghostty 1.0 Released, A New GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator

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7mo ago

Ghostty 1.0 Released, A New GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator

linuxiac.com /ghostty-1-0-gpu-accelerated-terminal-emulator-released/

78 comments

We need to stop this usage of proprietary MS GitHub + Discord in free software. It completely undermines the philosophy.
- The rampant use of Discord in FLOSS project is really disheartening. To join yet another Discord channel to receive any kind of support or discussions around the project, is off-putting.
  
  Discord is the worst. The siloing of tons of information that should be publicly searchable and accessible via a public forum, but instead it's siloed off into this closed wall with shitty search.
  I actually wish Lemmy was better searchable as well. I think Lemmy could be way better and drive adoption if it had a cross instance search engine / indexer.
  
  You're not alone with your opinion.
  
  Like, IRC exists and it just as useful to me as discord. Set up a wiki for FAQ’s and documentation.
  
  Plus there's Matrix 2 now so, no excuse
- Indeed.
- FYI "riced out" is a pretty racist term.
  
  Thanks for the info. Sincerely did not know.
  Since the mods deleted my post, I’ll repeat what I wrote, because aside from the unintentional racism, I feel like I made some valid points.
  GPU accelerated terminal emulators are already quite popular and if you use alacrity, kitty, or wez, then you already use them. They can help with not only cool effects like smooth scrolling and transparency, but also with massive text files. Handling an 8gb text file is complicated, and using a GPU can help with that.
  Ghostty’s selling points are not just the GPU acceleration, since that’s actually fairly standard nowadays. They are: (from their about page)
  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.
  I for one am very excited for this terminal and can’t wait to see what kind of development comes out of it!
  
  TIL, I need to avoid using that phrase.
  But I still don't know what it actually means. Wikipedia gave me the food, place names and acronyms. 🤷 I'll keep digging.
  EDIT: Maybe we should use "tune out" instead?
  EDIT2: Found your other post with the link.
What is the deal with getting gpu acceleration into a terminal emulator of all things? Of all the innovations that we could use, faster drawing of text doesn't feel like it should be a priority.
- GPU rendered text interfaces are pretty ubiquitous already. You can find that in IDEs, browsers, apps and GUIs of OSs. Drawing pixels is still a job the GPU excels at. No matter whether it's just text. So I don't see a point why we shouldn't apply that to terminal emulators as well.
  
  ok but such a sensational announcement like this suggests that before (and without) gpu acceleration the program was noticeably slow for some reason
- text is like the slowest thing to draw :P when debugging games, a running log can make the 3D rendering stutter significantly.
  
  See the minecraft f3 menu for a notorious example
- That's what I would have said till I tried using a TUI epub reader. The jankiness of line-level scrolling (rather than pixel-level like in a GUI app) is all but a deal breaker.
  I was then most surprised to discover that terminal emulators with this amazing cutting-edge technology (smooth scrolling) do not even exist.
- My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I'm not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.
  I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.
GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator
So is Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm, and even iTerm.
The README's About section[0] sheds no light on what sets Ghostty apart from the competition, while using vague terms and marketing hyperboles.
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty?tab=readme-ov-file#about
- From the website linked in the post:
  Windows, Tabs, and Splits: Manage multiple terminal windows, each with several tabs and splits. Better yet, it is all rendered via native UI elements.
  GPU-Accelerated Rendering: Employs Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux for efficient, high-speed rendering.
  Hundreds of Themes: Swap between light and dark modes automatically, or choose from a vast library of visually appealing themes.
  Ligatures and Grapheme Clustering: Shows ligatures flawlessly, handles multi-codepoint emoji properly, and accurately renders Arabic and Hebrew (in left-to-right mode).
  Kitty Graphics Protocol Support: Let terminal applications display inline images for a richer visual experience.
  It also says it's cross platform (macOS and Linux) and has configurable shortcuts with what they believe are sensible defaults.
  Although at least Alacritty already has all of these features (very different “sensible” defaults, though) and is also available on Windows so I'm not sold.
I tried it, and it worked well when I worked locally. But I can't use it to SSH into my server, a lot of things just don't work.
- SSHing to machines with bash seems to work fine, but it's a problem with ones that use fish, for some reason
  
  I can connect with SSH, but I can't open nano or w3m for example when I'm connected.
- You can do something like this:
  
  TERM=xterm-256color ssh user@host
  You could also install or copy over the term files or something. I can't recall. But it's the same as getting kitty to work which has more information online.
4k 120 fps ?
- And HDR
We are reaching autistic levels never seen before
Finally a gpu accelerated Terminal emulator with tabbing.
- Kitty has tabs
  
  ohhh, I didnt know that thanks but Ghostty has Zero config by default which i like (Edit: maybe I might use wezterm)
- Wezterm has tabs.
  
  Is wezterm gpu accelerated?
- Alacritty has windows and tabs.
  
  Idk how to activate it (And my distro Cachyos uses a custom alacrity config
Pardon my ignorance, is the default terminal that comes with my PopOS also a "terminal emulator" and Ghostty is a replacement for that?
- Yes. But it doesn't have to replace your default terminal emulator. You can have multiple and use any of them.
I'm not against it, but another factor that we should check in a terminal emulator (as a tool where you run everything from) is the system requirements.
I'm using urxvt and that's so easy on the system, it starts instantly. I can open multiple instances without worrying about the system resources.
I believe it uses X.org's text rendering. X.org uses OpenGL under the hood. It's not CPU rendered.
Alacrity felt bulkier when I tried. I will try this too though.
- Alacritty felt too slow and was missing settings I wanted (like mousewheel scroll) due to devs being opinionated. Kitty has been fast and flexible for me.
Unless it is trying to actually look cool like "cool retro terminal" or something, I fail to see how the point. I don't recall ever in the history of my terminal use ever thinking "man, this terminal emulator is so slow!" I mean, really... 120fps 4k terminals. Neat I guess?
- That’s not what GPU acceleration is used for.
- This. If you hadn't written it ...
Nice this project was always interesting! Seems very feature rich, glad it’s out of that invite only stage
What would be the best foss for Android ?
- Do you mean best FOSS terminal for Android? To my knowledge, there's only really Termux.

78 comments