---
title: "Ghostty"
url: https://perrotta.dev/2024/12/ghostty/
last_updated: 2026-01-18
---


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

{{< figure align="center" src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png" link="https://xkcd.com/927/" alt="Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit." attr="XKCD Courtesy of Randall Munroe" >}}

> 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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517447) 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](https://alacritty.org/) on Linux[^1].

I just have three gripes[^2] 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](https://ghostty.org/docs/help/terminfo#configure-ssh-to-fall-back-to-a-known-terminfo-entry),
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](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812#discussioncomment-11686920) 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](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2812#discussioncomment-11680349) there:

> I use [grml-zsh-config](https://grml.org/zsh). 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](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189). 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.

[^1]: On macOS, Alacritty isn't really great.

[^2]: [Seems familiar]({{< ref "2022-03-26-macos-terminal-app-gripes" >}}).