Ghostty Is Awesome
I've used iTerm2 for as long as I can remember myself using a Mac. I'd say iTerm and I are on good terms in our relationship.
At some point, I tried switching to vim and thought, wow, I want something faster — so I tinkered with Alacritty and Kitty, and they're both good. But I could never quite switch to them completely.
Then there's the Warp (ugh) abomination and Wave (promising, but niche).I just want a great, fast terminal that has a quick terminal window.
Mitchell Hashimoto released Ghostty 1.0, and it's absolutely awesome! It's all I asked for. Fast, snappy, intuitive, very easily configurable, and has toggle_quick_terminal built-in already.
Here's my config:
# ~/.config/ghostty/config
# The syntax is "key = value". The whitespace around the
# equals doesn't matter.
keybind = ctrl+z=close_surface
keybind = ctrl+d=new_split:right
keybind = ctrl+v=new_split:down
keybind = ctrl+shift+.=reload_config
# Global keybinds work system-wide as long as
# Ghostty application is running.
keybind = global:ctrl+`=toggle_quick_terminal
font-family = "JetBrains Mono"
font-size = 16
# Run ghostty +list-themes to browse available themes.
theme = andromeda
cursor-style = block
# You might now want this, I'm using Fish, but you're likely on Zsh.
shell-integration = fish
shell-integration-features = cursor, sudo, title
macos-titlebar-style = tabs
macos-option-as-alt = true
# Auto-update Ghostty when a new release is available.
auto-update = download
# gpg pinentry freaks out if $TERM is not set
term = xterm-256colorConfiguration caveats
You probably will want a system-wide command to open your terminal even if Ghostty is not running. I'm using skhd for this:
shift + ctrl - esc: osascript -e 'tell application "Ghostty" to activate'If you're using Raycast, you might just set an Application shortcut for Ghostty and that would do the same thing.
NoteGhostty has configuration actions, like
ghostty +list-themes, but I have not yet found a way to run Ghostty and tell it to open the quick terminal window instead of the standard window. I.e. run Ghostty without opening windows, and then programmatically triggertoggle_quick_terminal.
Ghostty is using OS-native tabs on MacOS. If you're still using Yabai (tiling window manager), it freaks out when you make a new tab and you have to retile. Honestly, it's probably time to switch to Raycast for tiling, but alternatively, you could probably get away with unconsumed: keybind modifier in Ghostty, and then catch the same keybind in skhd and retile on it, after sleeping for 0.2 seconds or something. Hacky.
Open source!
Unsurprisingly Ghostty is open source under Apache 2 License, and it's written in Zig. Just like with Zed, I'm very excited that if I need any changes to my favorite text editor or terminal, I can, in theory, just go and work on them myself, and learn a lot in the process. If you want to play around with Zig, here's a bunch of contributor friendly issues.