Ghostty on ¬ just serendipity 🍀

★ cmux

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:35:14 +0200

♠ cmux is the best implementation I’ve seen for agent orchestrators apps like Conductor, T3 Code, Dux, and friends:

Open source Ghostty-based macOS terminal with vertical tabs and notifications for AI coding agents. Built for multitasking, organization, and programmability.

It’s built on top of Ghostty¹ and it’s absolutely amazing. It’s effectively better than what I attempted to build once during an on-site hackathon wiring Claude Code sessions to Obsidian.

The invariant I care about the most:

restart your computer
reopen $APP
automatically restore every claude code session: layout & history preserved, scrollback intact

…is accomplished with fine elegance by cmux.

There’s no need to manually fiddle with tmux / zellij resurrection or alike.

Pair it with worktrunk (the wt CLI) for bonus points. Its integration is well-supported, achieving one cmux workspace per git worktree. For the time being I’m still invoking wt manually though, because that gives me more control.

It is very customizable.

Desirable side effect: existing ghostty settings are automatically inherited. They aren’t duplicated — they are effectively reused, which is superb. ↩︎

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Ghostty 1.3.0 release

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:10:42 +0100

♠ Ghostty 1.3.0:

Ghostty 1.3.0 is a significant release which includes many of the most requested features such as scrollback search, native scrollbars, click-to-move-cursor in shell prompts, and more. It also includes hundreds of improvements, bug fixes, and performance optimizations across all platforms.

This release features 6 months of work with changes from 180 contributors over 2,858 commits. Thank you to all the contributors, maintainers, community moderators, translators, packagers, and users who each helped make this release possible.

These release notes are painstakingly and lovingly hand-crafted by human Ghostty maintainers, including the full changelog. They take a combined 16+ hours to write, so please enjoy. 🥰

I never thought I could get so much joy from reading software release notes in 2026, in the era where many (most?) release notes are an afterthought, either generic and vague or bland and LLM-generated.

All hail to Mitchell Hashimoto.

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ghostty: keybindings

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 10:05:08 -0300

♠ TIL: A few keybindings from Ghostty. Assuming macOS. This list contains the keyboard shortcuts I tend to use weekly (or daily). No point in including an exhaustive list.

Cmd + d: split right
Cmd + Shift + d: split down
Cmd + Shift + p: command palette¹
Cmd + Shift + Enter: toggle (split) zoom (comparable to prefix + z in tmux a.k.a. resize-pane)
Cmd + Enter: toggle fullscreen (at the system window manager level)
Cmd + 1, Cmd + 2, etc: switch terminal tabs
Cmd + Shift + { / Cmd + Shift + }: cycle through tabs backwards / forward
Cmd + Shift + [ / Cmd + Shift + ]: cycle through splits backwards / forward
Cmd + .: open Ghostty config
Cmd + t: open new tab
Cmd + w: close current tab
Cmd + n: open new window

I found these defaults to be quite sensible.

The only added customization that I really occasionally use is this:

keybind = global:cmd+;=toggle_quick_terminal
keybind = global:cmd+shift+;=toggle_quick_terminal

…to toggle the quick terminal (previously).

After 1y using Ghostty, only now have I figured it out it has a command palette! ↩︎

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ghostty: splits

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:28:27 -0300

♠ Previously.

The best quality-of-life improvement for Ghostty I added in 2025¹: add the following keybindings to your Ghostty config:

# native: Cmd + Shift + d
keybind = cmd+shift+-=new_split:down
# native: Cmd + d
keybind = cmd+shift+|=new_split:right

Now you can split your terminal to the right and to the bottom with keyboard shortcuts.

Previously I was using the mouse to do so (right click + split).

Unless you count eye-candy as a QoL improvement :) ↩︎

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Ghostty shaders

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:17:36 -0300

♠ Ghostty supports shaders.

This repo hosts a collection of custom shaders readily available.

I integrated them with my .dotfiles via a submodule:

Ghostty config:

custom-shader = shaders/cursor_tail.glsl

The cursor_tail.glsl file was added with a symlink to the submodule.

The end result? See the demo in the repo README.

#power

Mitchell Hashimoto:

Okay, but this is all completely pointless,right? The most common use case is fun and that’s certainly not necessary (yeah, screw fun, right?). However, the primary practical use case for custom shaders is accessibility. Custom shaders are a really great way to specifically address certain forms of colorblindness, affect contrast or brightness to make things more readable, create “magnifying glass” effects, etc.

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ghostty: quick terminal

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 01:43:35 -0300

♠ Ghostty has a Quake-like¹ mode to pop up a terminal (console) from the top of the screen, no matter where you are.

Enable it with this setting in your Ghostty config:

keybind = global:cmd+;=toggle_quick_terminal

global: is what does the “no matter where you are” magic. Even if your focus is in another application / window, the shortcut will still work. I did not test it with conflicting shortcuts, it’s better to pick an uncommon one (don’t pick Cmd + T!).

Cmd + ; seems reasonable. I am also dabbling with Cmd + Shift + Enter.

The terminal session persists. Say you open vim and then close the terminal. Upon opening it again, vim will still be there. This blog post was written from the quick terminal.

See also: Guake Terminal. ↩︎

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Ghostty: migrating config to dotfiles

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:56:27 +0200

♠ This year I migrated my terminal application from iTerm2 to Ghostty on macOS.

Ghostty has great defaults; I find that there are only a handful of customizations that I need to make to satisfy my needs.

One can configure ghostty by opening its config file with Cmd + ,, the typical preferences shortcut on macOS.

In a vanilla system, that config file is initially $HOME/Library/Application\ Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config (docs).

That location is not convenient / accessible though.

Upon digging the ghostty config docs:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ghostty/config.
if XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not defined, it defaults to $HOME/.config/ghostty/config.

macOS-specific Path (macOS only):
$HOME/Library/Application\ Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config
macOS also supports the XDG configuration path mentioned above.

I prefer the ~/.config/ghostty location: it is cross-platform, compatible with Linux as well, and I can easily add it to my dotfiles.

Moving the file to that location yields a no-frills migration:

% mv $HOME/Library/Application\ Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config $HOME/.config/ghostty/config

As of today, the config looks like this:

# https://ghostty.org/docs/config
# keep-sorted start
cursor-style-blink = false
keybind = shift+enter=text:\n
macos-icon = chalkboard
shell-integration-features = no-cursor
theme = catppuccin-macchiato
# keep-sorted end

The first line is a handy shortcut to the config documentation.

The keep-sorted stanzas stem from my tendency to keep the house tidy. They are not merely comments: the sorting is actually enforced via a git pre-commit hook.

cursor-style-blink = false: blinking cursor is unnecessarily distracting.

keybind = shift+enter=text:\n: Claude Code added this, it’s surprising it’s not the default:

[...]
│ > /termi                                                     │
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
  /terminal-setup   Install Shift+Enter key binding for newlines

macos-icon = chalkboard: bells and whistles.

shell-integration-features = no-cursor: some context.

theme = catppuccin-macchiato: more bells and whistles. You may like: ghostty +list-themes.

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ghostty: find popular themes

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 02:56:37 -0300

♠ Ghostty 1.0 was barely released and it’s already quite popular.

I’ve been daily driving it since December last year and it has been quite enjoyable. There are a few annoyances here and there, but its minimalism and speed make up for them.

Today I stumbled upon ghostty.town, which hosts user-submitted configs. Reminds me of:

My current config is quite simple (by design!):

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

theme=catppuccin-macchiato

macos-titlebar-style=tabs

I got inspired to use the Catppuccin theme thanks to Jon Seager.

There’s no need to customize the default font as it’s quite sensible (JetBrains Mono, as per).

Update(2025-07-22): You may also like: ghostty +list-themes.

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Ghostty

serendipity@perrotta.dev (Thiago Perrotta) — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:50:31 -0300

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

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 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.

On macOS, Alacritty isn’t really great. ↩︎
Seems familiar. ↩︎

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Ghostty on ¬ just serendipity 🍀

★ cmux

Ghostty 1.3.0 release

ghostty: keybindings

ghostty: splits

Ghostty shaders

ghostty: quick terminal

Ghostty: migrating config to dotfiles

ghostty: find popular themes

Ghostty

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

2. Blinking cursor #

3. No scrollback search #

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