¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

From the series: yet another terminal emulator in Rust Zig™:

https://ghostty.org/

Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

So you just recreated Alacritty / Kitty?

Popularity on Hacker News exploded, with over 2k stars. For some reason, anything written in Rust Zig automatically becomes popular.

Snark aside, I tested it yesterday on macOS and it turns out it’s quite amazing.

In particular, I like:

• it’s fast
• it’s minimalist, and yet it’s feature-rich in an unobtrusive way
• it’s native (no Electron and friends, amen)
• it has sensible configuration defaults

It resembles my experience of using Alacritty on Linux¹.

I just have three gripes² with it until I am able to fully adopt it:

1. ssh does not work out-of-the-box due to xterm shenanigans #

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/3161:

Error opening terminal: xterm-ghostty.

They do provide a workaround, by the means of making a change to ~/.ssh/config:

# .ssh/config
Host *
  SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color

The workaround suffices.

2. Blinking cursor #

When using zsh, it’s impossible to make the cursor stop blinking.

There’s an issue about it:

Setting cursor-style-blink to false has virtually no effect because shell integration will automatically turn on blinking.

I also jumped on the bandwagon with a comment there:

I use grml-zsh-config. When opening Ghostty, it starts with a bar+blinking cursor(1).

When spawning a new zsh shell within zsh, it changes to a block+non-blocking cursor(2).

(2) is the desired behavior – iTerm2 and Terminal.app both do it out-of-the-box. I am not sure why Ghostty sets a bar+blinking cursor, whilst the other terminal emulators do not.

This discussion / issue seems to track down the root cause. I would suggest converting it back to an Issue. Happy to provide logs and/or more info if it helps!

There’s no elegant workaround for 2). Should they ever fix that issue, I am ready to switch from iTerm2.

Edit(2024-12-29): The following config works to achieve (2):

cursor-style-blink = false
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

3. No scrollback search #

Edit(2024-12-29): This section was added afterwards. The initial post only had two gripes.

There is no Cmd + f to search. This is a big deal. It’s just a matter of time: the FR has lots of upvotes.

iTerm2 is great, but it has way too many features, and I barely use any.