Ghost­ty

The Ghostty ter­minal is a new en­trant in the ter­minal em­u­lator space. The cre­ator, Mitchell Hashimoto, had started working on Ghostty as a side-pro­ject in 2021 with the first public re­lease in De­cember 2024.

Hashimoto is well-known in the de­vel­oper com­mu­nity, having co-founded HashiCorp— the com­pany be­hind pop­ular cloud in­fra­struc­ture tools like Va­grant, Ter­raform, and Packer. In early 2025, HashiCorp was ac­quired by IBM for $6.4 bil­lion.¹

Ghostty is the first major solo pro­ject Mitchell's re­leased since leaving HashiCorp— in De­cember of 2023. He doc­u­mented the de­vel­op­ment in a very cool (and de­tailed) de­vel­oper log , which pro­vides an in-depth look at the inner-work­ings of the ter­minal em­u­lator and some of the de­sign de­ci­sions that went into it.

Un­for­tu­nately, Ghostty is not yet avail­able on Win­dows; but sup­port is planned for the fu­ture. Cur­rently, it has sup­port for Linux and macOS— using SwiftUI na­tive com­po­nents. It also sup­ports GPU-ac­cel­er­ated ren­dering on both OSs.

Fea­tures

There has been a lot of ex­cite­ment around Ghostty. Ap­par­ently there are a lot of de­vel­opers looking for a modern ter­minal that is fast and fea­ture-rich, and Ghostty hits that sweet spot. It has quickly gained pop­u­larity— and for good reason.

Ghostty is written in the Zig pro­gram­ming lan­guage and uses Mitchell's own libxev li­brary for a cross-plat­form event loop. In my ex­pe­ri­ence, it just about matches the light­ning speed of the other light­weight champ— Alacritty .

If you're fa­miliar with font ren­dering, you'll prob­ably have heard of Harf­Buzz . This package is a common de­pen­dency among among Ghostty and sev­eral others em­u­la­tors. It pro­vides text shaping and can sub­sti­tute glyphs to render lig­a­tures: --> ==> !== <= >= ++ ##.

Splits and Tabs

If you do want to use the built-in splits and tabs, have a look at the Ac­tion Ref­er­ence guide in Ghost­ty's key­binding docs. To list the de­fault key­bind­ings, you can run:

Here you can see the Ghostty de­fault key­bind­ings for splits, tabs, re­sizing, and more.

• On macOS, super refers to the Command key. On Win­dows or Linux, it might be the Windows key.
• One handy one to keep in mind as you're set­ting up your config is the reload_config key­binding:
  • super + shift + ,

I like Tmux be­cause it's portable— you can in­stall it on any Unix ma­chine. And if you de­cide to switch to a dif­ferent em­u­lator, you don't have to learn new short­cuts for pane-split­ting and tabs. It's the same be­havior every­where.

Image Sup­port

Ghostty sup­ports the Kitty image pro­tocol, which al­lows you to dis­play im­ages di­rectly in the ter­minal. This is useful for dis­playing screen­shots, icons, or other im­ages without leaving the ter­minal en­vi­ron­ment. You'll have to in­stall the kitty package on your system to use this fea­ture.

Shaders

Though it's not ex­actly a pro­duc­tive fea­ture, Ghostty also sup­ports .glsl (OpenGL Shading Lan­guage) shaders. This al­lows you to layer vi­sual ef­fects onto the ren­dered ter­minal. To me, this has been one of the most fun quirks about Ghostty that sets it apart.

Most of the working shaders that I've found are avail­able in a GitHub repo from hackr-sh. Down­load the .glsl files and place them in a di­rec­tory like ~/.config/ghostty/shaders/. Then you can use the custom-shader=shaders/<name>.glsl config op­tion to apply as many as you want. Note that on a com­puter with less re­sources, you might no­tice some per­for­mance loss when using shaders.

The only one I use con­sis­tently is the cursor_smear.glsl shader, which adds a nice trailing ef­fect to the cursor:

At the time of writing, the cursor shaders will only work with the Ghostty nightly build. You can down­load the latest nightly from the Ghostty re­leases page . You can find the .glsl files them­selves for cursor ef­fects in a GitHub repo by user KroneCorylus.