zlacker

Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?

>>helter+(OP)
It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.

>>helter+(OP)
There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0.

Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.

>>helter+(OP)
Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.

>>helter+(OP)
While foot focuses on minimalism, Ghostty brings along a shit ton of features like support for Kitty's (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) graphics protocol (in terminal images! - https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/), advanced window management (windows, tabs, splits) and OpenGL pixelshaders (https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html)

Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.

>>helter+(OP)
gnome-terminal still writes out its scrollback history to the filesystem, potentially on-disk and not just tmpfs. It uses encryption to obfuscate that these days, but, it's still pretty weird behavior. Its performance is also relatively poor.

>>helter+(OP)
One fun thing, it supports shaders: https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html

>>helter+(OP)
Or WezTerm which is much more usable and polished than this. I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media hype.

>>comman+94
The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit as well.

>>neop1x+Ft
I use Ghostty because it is a native application, and it looks great on macOS and GNOME. WezTerm, Kitty, and Foot don't do that for me. Foot is great though.

>>helter+(OP)
gnome-terminal is GTK 3 last I checked, and foot uses Wayland primitives. If you want a native terminal feel, Ghostty would be a great terminal. On Linux, my backup terminal is Ptyxis, authored by Christian Hergert. I recommend Ptyxis over gnome-terminal or gnome-console.

>>trista+Py
Ghostty feels a lot less native than foot on Wayland. Example: it doesn't respect Fontconfig preferences, so it doesn't use your configured monospace font. In general, Ghostty feels quite alien for me.

>>helter+(OP)
FWIW, I found no reason to switch from Konsole.

But I'm using KDE anywa, and I don't care about kitty graphic protocol, I have better suited apps to watch images.

>>helter+(OP)
- It looks good. Or more correctly, it is easy to make it look good. If one spends a lot of time in the Terminal emulator, it looking good has some positives.

- It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and version control.

Edit: - At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs is limited to starting an entirely new process.

>>trista+oy
They're all native applications.

>>neop1x+Ft
> I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media hype.

It's not hype. Here's a comprehensive review of a lot of terminals and Ghostty did very well--"State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions" [1]

[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...

>>neop1x+Ft
Wezterm is an excellent project but it doesn't have native UI chrome like Ghostty does.

>>helter+(OP)
My biggest reason for using it over gnome terminal is osc52 support https://ali.anari.io/posts/osc52/ which lets you copy paste using a escape sequence. Meaning you can copy paste when ssh'ed into another machine. Gnome terminal doesn't support this currently and there is a discussion on whether they will because of security concerns https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495

>>sdqali+xL
the edit is not true. footclient is, like, right there.

>>alwill+mV
Have you read the post you linked, and do you understand what it is about?

>>alwill+mV
No sign of alacritty :(

>>akho+4U1
I use niri and footclient -N, so builtin window and tab completion don't appeal to be.

Foot feels fast, but I've not actually measured the latency. It also seems to use less CPU than GPU accelerated terminals (which it isn't) from just glancing at btop. So I'm not sold on GPU-acceleration as a feature unless I see benchmarks demonstrating the value in improved latency and reduced CPU use compared to foot

I love that foot's scrollback search, selection expansive, and copy can be entirely keyboard driven. Huge QoL feature for me that often seems neglected to me in other terminals.

>>trista+oy
After some update, Ghostty stopped working on Gnome+Mesa on older Intel graphics (IvyBridge). It doesn't really feel native to me if it doesn't run everywhere the toolkit it uses runs. I understand the reasons, but it leaves a sour taste.

>>virapt+fT
No, they're not. Don't be pedantic that it's native because it is written in Rust or whatever, that's clearly not what was meant.

>>akho+4U1
I had never tried footclient. Thank you for the correction.

>>saagar+kr2
There's no single definition of native. If it's clearly not that for you, feel free to say what's the threshold you use.

>>alwill+mV
Can ghostty finally search in the scrollback? The last time I tried it it didn't support a freaking search. This is #1 feature I need from any terminal.

>>virapt+7w3
Using the platform native UI toolkit