Ghostty on macOS

I got private beta access (quite late), and Ghostty is probably going to be out in its first public release any day now. Here are my initial impressions, having used it for a couple of weeks on macOS.

What I like about Ghostty

I spend most of my workday in the terminal and in Neovim specifically. Therefore, the terminal is my workhorse and I'm a little picky about what I need/want.

Ghostty is really snappy. However, I can't really tell a difference in snappiness from Kitty or Wezterm (when Wezterm is set to max_fps = 120) during daily work.

It's very easy to configure the editor and enable e.g. opacity, background blur and make that look really flashy (hint, hint for all nerdy YouTubers out there).

I also like that you get a native notification about new versions of Ghostty. Right now, it will just update whenever there are new commits in the main branch but in the future, I hope there will be some sort of release notes directly in this notification.

It's got a native macOS title bar that you can customize. Hiding the title bar comes at a cost; it will disable the ability to use tabs which is really the only way to efficiently jump between multiple projects (other than using e.g. tmux or zellij). However, you can integrate the tabs into the title bar. Slightly difficult to illustrate in text form.

I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but fonts render thicker for me in Kitty. I can't figure out why this is happening, but they look just right in Ghostty (and Wezterm for that matter).

Most common colorschemes just work out of the box too (I think there are 300+ bundled ones), so if you're a tokyonight or catppuccin fan, you're of course golden. Ghostty uses iTerm2 themes.

Ghostty also sports a number of features which I haven't used yet or had time to look into yet, like custom shaders and the ability to render images in the terminal. But I would like to look into if I can get inline images in Obsidian markdown files to render when I open them up in Neovim (using obsidian.nvim and render-markdown.nvim). I also want to make presenterm show high-resolution images, just like how Kitty does it. I'm sure it just comes down to a configuration setting, as both Ghostty and Kitty use the Kitty graphics protocol. And finally, Ghostty is supposed to be able to switch color themes based on OS dark/light settings. Something I have until summer to figure out. 😉

Configuration

Ghostty is configured with an ini-like file, kind of like how you configure Kitty. This is how I like to browse through the available configuration options:

ghostty +show-config --default --docs | nvim

I've placed my configuration file in ~/.config/ghostty/config and to enable syntax highlighting, you can grab the files in /Applications/Ghostty.app/Contents/Resources/vim/vimfiles and place these in your Neovim installation. You can see how I've placed them here for reference.

My configuration is available here.

I've also made Ghostty show the current working directory of tab titles, when I have Neovim running in the tab. I've achieved this by adding the following to my Neovim Lua configuration (but unfortunately I don't know how to permanently set the tab title to the $cwd:

if vim.fn.getenv("TERM_PROGRAM") == "ghostty" then
  vim.opt.title = true
  vim.opt.titlestring = "%{fnamemodify(getcwd(), ':t')}"
end

What I miss from other terminal emulators

Session management

I wrote a blog post on Wezterm's session management and why I prefer to not use tmux as a session manager. In short, I get slightly annoyed by the apparent screen drawing latency of tmux and I also feel keyboard input can sometimes be affected. With Kitty I use a custom tab setup, which is kind of nice too. All of this stems from me having used tmux in the past and I really like having sessions and windows/tabs as a way to navigate projects.

But ideally, I would like to achieve some sort of hybrid between what I have today in Wezterm and Kitty (but in Ghostty):

• Show the different sessions at the top of my terminal window, where each session is the $cwd, which is in my case representative of a git project name.
• Within a session, have the ability to branch out into tabs, so I can have multiple tabs when I'm in a certain project context.
• Quickly move between the sessions using hotkeys such as Ctrl + Shift + [ and Ctrl + Shift + ]. Move between tabs with Cmd + 1..0.
• Natively hit a keymap which will bring up a zoxide-powered folder/project selector, which will upon selection execute Neovim in a new session, which uses the $cwd of the desired project path.

With Wezterm, I've got this all working except the first point on showing all active sessions at the top of the terminal window.

With Kitty, I have only achieved having tabs with the mentioned keymaps, but also haven't spent a great time digging into this. It does not seem to provide session management out of the box. Kittens are implied to perhaps enable some sort of session management here.

With Ghostty, I get most of this working, except being able to branch out into tabs, as I already use tabs instead of sessions. What I really miss though, is the last part with a zoxide-powered project selector. Instead, I have to hit Cmd + t to create a new tab and then type in z someproj or zi someproj to select a project. Then I have to hit enter and finally execute nvim. It's okay, but this is something I might want to look into.

Cursor trail

Although a gimmick, I kind of like Kitty's and Neovide's built-in cursor trail/smear (called cursor_trail in Kitty) which adds a neat effect when the cursor darts around in the editor. I actually miss it in Ghostty. Of course, I forget I don't have it after about 10 seconds...

Issues

It's early days (it's not even out in the public yet), and I'm sure any issues will be ironed out over time by @mitchellh, the community and other projects used in tandem with Ghostty.

Tabs and Aerospace

Since I'm on macOS and using the Aerospace tiling window manager, I've noticed that Ghostty's tabs don't work well, as they are treated as windows and offset the whole window when adding new tabs: nikitabobko/Aerospace#68.

However, I've found a workaround, and that is to make Ghostty into a floating window (like this). It works for me, but this means I can't use the tiling behaviors of Aerospace with the workspace the Ghostty window resides in, which I'd ideally like to do in the long term.

Lualine jumping around

Neovim is grid-based and depending on how you scale the Ghostty window, you might see padding around the window as there is not room for a full character to be rendered. This becomes more apparent with lualine, which ideally would be tightly snapped to the bottom of the terminal window.

I'm not sure how Kitty does it, but it manages much better when you change font size or resize the terminal window, avoiding rendering empty spacing/padding below the lualine.

This is an extremely minor annoyance and only affects the aesthetics.

Conclusion

In summary, I think Ghostty will become my go-to workhorse for serving up Neovim in which I spend my days working professionally as well as on hobby projects. I really like it so far!

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