Ghostty

Ghostty is led in development by Mitchell Hashimoto

Ghostty's configuration file format is generally kept backward compatible within the 1.x series

Installation methods for Ghostty 1.4.0 cover macOS and various Linux distributions

Ghostty is positioned among established terminal products, covering both macOS and Linux desktop environments with native controls and unified configuration

Ghostty is written in Zig and adapted to each platform's native UI framework, rather than adopting Electron or web technology approaches

The release of Ghostty 1.4.0 received 286 points and 101 comments on Hacker News

Ghostty uses platform-native UI toolkits (SwiftUI/AppKit on macOS and GTK on Linux) rather than Electron or web technology stacks.

JetBrains' adoption of libghostty is the first large-scale implementation case of Ghostty's "core library + multiple front-ends" architecture plan.

libghostty is a reusable library extracted from the Ghostty terminal emulator, encapsulating the terminal state machine, parser and rendering logic.

This update fixes the issue where images displayed only alt text in scenarios with tmux allow-passthrough and focus-events enabled, as well as full-screen rendering in kitty, Ghostty and iTerm2 3.5+.

iTerm2 has its own window rendering approach, and its support for new system material APIs usually lags behind Ghostty.

On macOS, Ghostty uses the system's native UI frameworks to draw its windows, so it can better take advantage of system-level visual effects.

Ghostty is an open-source terminal emulator led by Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of HashiCorp; it released version 1.0 at the end of 2024 and is written in the Zig language.

The true Liquid Glass effect is only available in Ghostty on macOS 26; in other environments it may appear as an ordinary transparent theme.

iglass is a terminal theme designed for iTerm2 and Ghostty, supports macOS and Linux, and is completely free and open source.

xtty faces competition from terminal products such as iTerm2, Warp, and Ghostty.

Ghostty provides a libghostty library for third-party integration, which can be embedded as a rendering engine.

Ghostty is written in the Zig language and directly calls Metal (macOS) and OpenGL (Linux) for GPU-accelerated rendering.

cmux is a native Mac terminal built for multi-task programming agents, featuring agent workspaces, notifications, a browser panel, a Socket API, and optional cloud machines; the local terminal is free and open source.

The Ghostty terminal only supports Mac and Linux and does not support Windows; it is configuration-file-driven, with all settings essentially being a file that can be modified by an AI agent.