Ghostty 1.0 Released, A New GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator
Ghostty 1.0 Released, A New GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator
Meet Ghostty 1.0: The GPU-accelerated terminal emulator exits beta after two years, challenging Kitty and Alacritty with its speed and features.
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.
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.
You're not alone with your opinion.
Indeed.
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
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.
You can do something like this:
TERM=xterm-256color ssh user@hostYou 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.
What would be the best foss for Android ?
Do you mean best FOSS terminal for Android? To my knowledge, there's only really Termux.
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.
My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow.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 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.
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.
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.
4k 120 fps ?
And HDR
Running CDDA
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 ...