thoughts about ghostty? 👻

[lovelindhoni]

I built and tried Ghostty today, and I could see no reason to switch from WezTerm to it. I just find it all overhyped. What do you guys think?

[yriveiro]

I tried it yesterday, and I feel nothing fantastic about it more than filling it like a native application.

• I couldn't configure the tab style and information (or at least I don't know how to)
• I need to return to using Tmux. While I love it, I was only using its Pane and Session management features, which Wezterm already provides
• Its image rendering isn't better than Wezterm's, and when using Neovim + image.vim, Ghostty crashes.
• I'm biased regarding configuration since I'm accustomed to Lua scripting

Regarding performance, while I don't find Wezterm slow, there's always room for improvement. Areas like the image protocol and plugin system could be improved as well

One advantage Ghostty might have is its potentially larger contributor base compared to Wezterm. Wezterm project has 104 PR open and 1.1K issues.

I don't see the ROI of moving to Ghostty, the only reason to do it is if Wezterm stops in time or gets too heavy as iTerm2 did.

[habahabahaba]

1. On macOS, Ghostty has secure keyboard entry.
2. According to these (quite extensive) tests, Ghostty is 2 to 5 times more performant than Wezterm, depending on the scenario.

[yriveiro]

@habahabahaba

• Secure keyboard entry is a nice feature indeed.
• Regarding perf. Performance is bonded to user context in the sense that if the user doesn't feel the lag, that performance has no intrinsic value, others for sure will switch, I went from iTerm2 to Alacritty even Alacritty lacked almost everything but perf. At the time programming with Neovim on iTerm2 was unbearable with large files.