I like Rex and have started using it and its replacing Ghostty for me. This has made me a bit confused: is the intent for Rex to replace Ghostty? not sure when I would use one vs the other yet

I had a look to see how Rex was coming along the other day and it seems there's still no Linux beta (though MacOs users have one).

I'm still interested to check it out though none of these things have ever interested me too much so far.

I'd be happy there even if he did, maybe there's a delayed schedule for Rex to be publicly available.

Would be some serious 4d chess if you were his sockpuppet account.

That's because he doesn't have a product yet

One example that comes to my mind is libopus: https://github.com/xiph/opus

If you have structs that might need to be extended, you can use "versioned structs". One popular technique is to include the struct size as the first field. The struct size is set to `offsetof(mystruct, lastmember) + sizeof(lastmember)` and the receiver of the struct can use this to check if a member exists. The ARA API is a good example: https://github.com/Celemony/ARA_API/blob/65ec5c43b943a48cb54...

My job requires thinking about things like this (well, more senior and experienced people actually drive the final decisions, but I still need to understand them). Seeing the level of rigor that went into the development of a stable C abi for this is insane, it hits on pretty much all the checklists (and more!) that we have internally.

take a look at hpy, which is explicitly designing a better API for python C extensions. https://hpyproject.org/

Indeed it is. It feels like libghostty was only announced yesterday and already there are things like ghostel for emacs that are imo far above and beyond the other emacs terminal options.

since you are using kitty, make sure you know these:

- kitten, a lot, they are useful. I will name a few. kitten ssh, keep a long lived connection so that you need to authenticated once for the whole kitty window. kitten tranfer, transfer files between remote and local when you are inside the remote host. kitten clipboard, take data on the remote host to the local clipboard.

- customize your keyboard shortcuts to be more efficient on creating new tab, moving between tab, keep the current working directory when creating new tab, split panel (even you are on the remot host).

- tune the performance configuration.

- on macOS, you can hide the title bar of the window, give more minimal look.

- take time to learn from their documentation, a lot of useful things to be known.

- the author is uncompromised on the performance, e.g. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/884

- don't ask the author to change kitty icon (but you can change it yourself, I did): https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#i-do-not-like-the-kitty...

Though zooming images is not there yet, is very need feature indeed.

libghostty provides terminal emulation, without any UI. An application embedding it will need to provide the UI.

libvte provides terminal emulation complete with a gtk UI.

In terms of terminal emulation, libghostty implements several protocols that libvte does not. For example kitty keyboard, kitty graphics, and desktop notification.

> You can now create a terminal in ~1,500 lines of C that has more features and better performance than just about any terminal that existed in 2025, and most today in 2026.5 And thanks to the rich ecosystem of language bindings, you can do this in every major programming language. You get this for free. For almost no effort. You can just do it.

can i just get you people to slow down a bit and explain: why are you guys building your own terminal? whats the deep pain here?

(i'm not at all being skeptical, i respect you guys enough to understand that there's something here I don't get and it's my skill issue, so I am trying to learn)

I hope we won't be complaining about no more competition in the terminal core space like we do with browsers now :)

I switched from iTerm to Ghostty because:

- iTerm started pushing a ton of updates to add features that absolutely no one wanted. AI chat in the terminal emulator (not within the terminal), integrated web browser, etc.

- Some of those features turned out to introduce major vulnerabilities, so they had to push even more frequent updates to patch them. It’s extremely annoying to have your work interrupted by multiple update prompts in a day from your terminal.

- iTerm has visual glitches (line artifacts appearing when windows are opened/closed) on non-Retina monitors.

That said, I miss the GUI for changing settings. Ghostty’s settings file format requires looking up keys every time you want to change something, and it isn’t nearly as powerful as iTerm profiles.

I'm also still on iterm2. I don't quite get what people want from a terminal emulator, for me it's mostly window management: being able to open iterm2 fullscreen with a hotkey, having panes and tabs, that's it.

I wouldn't even need panes and tabs if I used tmux, but I can't be arsed: I used to but now much prefer using a GUI and not have to do tabs/scroll/selection differently than every other application.

I ditched iTerm2 a few years back, when I opened MacOS Terminal, typed in it - and it appeared to be predicting my keystrokes it was so much faster. I'd never noticed how slow iTerm2 was until this. I understand its performance has improved since, not sure by how much.

I was on iTerm2 for a long time, but nowadays I find myself using: https://bateri.dev

A big reason I gave up iTerm2 was that it didn't use a plain text file as its native configuration format -- I was just too obsessive about wanting my config in git to be able to handle it!

Search and tmux integration are where iTerm2 really shines imo. I use Ghostty 99% of the time now though. (Search did get a lot better with the latest release.) What features specifically keep you on iTerm2?

  - Font rendering (and cell size control) is still better on iTerm2, although Ghostty has been rapidly gaining
  - Compact theme with thin titlebar tabs
  - Profiles
  - Window arrangements
  - In-terminal API (which Mitchell has acknowledged as a useful feature)

Image support is much better in iterm2, you can open them, save them - then you can easily download any file. And fonts also look much nicer.

Vertical tabs is why i keep using iterm

This is a confusing question. If the terminal emulator is using the server's frame buffer, then it is running on the server end. If the terminal emulator is 'over SSH', then the actual terminal emulator runs on the client end.

They are two very different setups, the former being covered by the likes of zhcon, jfbterm, fbpad, and my virtual terminal system; and the latter being a wide range of things depending from what one's desires are on the client.

He posted here a while back, paraphrased "My revenue model is my bank account has 10 digits". He's wealthy and likes to code and is giving back to the community

He's a billionaire, has sponsors and has a startup.

"Mitchell Hashimoto is a software developer and entrepreneur best known as the co-founder of HashiCorp, which was acquired by IBM for $6.4 billion in 2025."

Many common ways for the financing of an free and open source project to be sustainable (The main keyword) in the mid to long term:

1) A non-profit company that has full-time employees but supported via sponsorships: (gnu project, mastodon, omarchy, zig)

2) Multiple for-profit companies that each have full-time employees contributing to an open source project that they all use: (ocaml, linux, rust)

3) An ultra high net worth individual that has full-time contributors to open source and supported via a non-profit (signal, ghostty)

4) A for-profit company that has dedicated full-time employees that have full support and own the direction of the open source project (go, swift, java)

5) VC funded open source projects (Herdr, Bun, Deno, Burno, Atuin)

All other options such as low donations like "buy me a coffee", ko-fi, are completely unsustainable, now that AI agents exist.

He has billionaire investors. Probably the only grey note about his ventures here.

Agreed. I feel like too much projects are too reluctant to take the responsibility to say "this is production ready".

Let's not assume a project is incomplete if it doesn't have official windows support. Microsoft's relationship with Windows users is abusive. It's ok to not contribute to that.

I use it on Windows all the time, just use a community solution or roll your own

There are several third-party Windows ports:

- Noctty (~517 stars)

- GhosttyWin3

- ghostty-windows (~79 stars)

Soon rex will release for Windows

Use Windows Terminal. Nearly a match for Ghostty on Windows. Well, it's Windows

WezTerm was a nice term and I think it's still ahead of Ghostty in standards support (far fewer renderer bugs). Ideas like built-in tmux were also good and came before their time. But there's been no stable release since February 2024, so the project feels dead to me. Also, large config files are a pain — I like Ghostty's defaults.

Foot ( https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot )

iTerm2 has way more features and configuration options

Ghostty is simpler and faster

What's better? Only works for some or works for anyone?

What's better, an apple or an orange?

I used iTerm2 until I noticed that Ghostty’s New Tab opens at the current working directory.

Haven’t gone back since.

I think Ghostty is great for the most part but I keep going back to iTerm2, personally.

iTerm just feel less buggy. For example I was running Claude in a container the other day and the slash command complete wasn’t rendering properly with Ghostty but worked perfectly fine with iTerm.

I want to switch to Ghostty because I prefer how simple Ghostty is overall and I think the project itself is very cool and an important piece of software (libghostty) but it doesn’t quite get there for _for my use cases_.

it's Zig with a C ABI

   libghostty-vt 1.0 is here. libghostty is a portable, high-performance C library for terminal emulation, extracted directly from the core of Ghostty.

It's Zig

It’s Zog with a C ABI. Zig bindings are a bit of a moving target still.

He mentions semantic versioning in the post, so major version.

Aren't those the same?

My opinion is that this idea that seems to be in the same direction of all SaaS is dead because everyone will just build their own products is true only for a subset of people.

I do agree in case of terminals this subset of people might overlap a lot with the entire market -> developers.

I see the future a bit different as in many people/companies will offer to the market some kind of building blocks that will be extra configurable by agents and then we are combining them.

In this case libghostty is such a component that can be integrated in a lot of things and people building those things want to work at a higher level of abstraction than building the terminal emulator. To be honest is among the best example of such a component that I see in the future that I think about.

AI is not magic; there is a fair amount of work involved in getting a complex piece of software correct and performant, and once someone has done that it makes way more sense to build on top of it than to reinvent the wheel.

Most people are in some way constrained in their AI usage, be it a session/week limit or the token pricing. So while you now can definitely build apps on your own you couldn’t before, you still have to make some economic considerations like before: My company is still not in the business of building terminal emulators. Even if an agent takes on the majority of the work to build one for me, I still have to invest some time and focus into directing it where I want it to go; it’s using up a big chunk of my usage limits if I want something anywhere near as polished as ghostty; and like all software, it wants permanent maintenance, bug fixes, and updates. AI doesn’t change any of that.

It’s time for the industry to realize that the weights may have shifted toward build vs. buy, but the general SaaS calculus is still in effect.