Ghostty 1.4.0
77 points by BD103
77 points by BD103
As much as I've liked Ghostty, I've had 2 issues with it that kept me from switching. It takes too long to start on my Plasma desktop. Konsole starts in 100-200ms, but Ghostty always takes a second or longer. I never figured out the root cause, maybe Konsole is half-loaded because Qt and KDE, but still a negative. The second problem is their refusal to implement vertical tabs. Mitchell said they'll someday™ have their own tab implementation, but that day is beyond horizon.
I'm gonna test the new version and see if the first issue is fixed. I'm still kinda partial to Konsole. It fits very well with rest of the desktop env.
Ghostty's startup time is dominated almost completely by GTK. The issue is that we use GTK on Linux. The answer to this is an alternate frontend to libghostty, of which there are a handful. A person from the KDE core team also noted on the orange site that they're working on a Konsole replacement based on libghostty, so I assume that'll resolve this too.
Thanks for the callout to the new thing! It seems to be fair bit away (someone's personal project) from being a real Konsole replacement. I do look forward to trying it out when that happens though!
Oh, and thanks for bringing terminals in Zeitgeist again!
I'm not saying that's invalid criticism but how often do people really start terminals?
Maybe I'm weird but I open them (whichever ones I use) and then they live until the machine gets rebooted, which happens on the scale of weeks to months these days. But yes, a second is not great.
Dunno about other people, but my Konsole windows are not very long lived, at least on my personal machine. I live inside Emacs, but by force of habits run most commands in Konsole. Most of them take few ms to finish. Some take ~30 min to finish. I also tend to open a number of Konsole windows simultaneously for parallel tasks, because I've found that separate windows integrate much better with my DE usage than tabs. This makes median lifetime of my Konsole window at about 10 min, and I open it about a donze times (at least) throughout any given day.
I cannot be the only person with this habit, just statistically speaking.
Om work machine I do tend to have long lived iTerm window, but work forces daily restarts, and more importantly, macOS' window management sucks and I'm kinda forced into using tabs inside iTerm. At least they're vertical.
This may be a bit off-topic, so feel free to ignore it, but these release notes made me think about how security fixes get shipped.
As far as I can tell, 1.3.1 (March 13) was the last patch release before this one, and its notes don't mention any security fixes. The advisories listed here seem to have been disclosed just before 1.4.0, so I'm not suggesting they sat unpatched for months. I don't know when they were reported, and coordinated disclosure would look exactly like this.
What bothers me a little is the delivery path. Getting these fixes means taking 1.4.0 as a whole, including the new copy-on-select default on macOS and the GTK 4.18 requirement, which rules out Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The notes point those users to an older version or the Flatpak, but there doesn't seem to be a 1.3.2, so I couldn't tell where the fixes would come from for them. If I've missed a backport, I'd be glad to be corrected.
I understand a small team can't maintain several release lines, and I use Ghostty and like it a lot. Still, security fixes have costs that fall on people other than the maintainers, and I wonder whether a patch release for the previous minor, even just one, might be worth the effort. I may well be underestimating what that takes.
Still, security fixes have costs that fall on people other than the maintainers, and I wonder whether a patch release for the previous minor, even just one, might be worth the effort
Then why don't you do it?
It's funny the little things that make you change. I used wezterm, alacritty, and kitty prior to ghostty. I loved the ability in wezterm to use Lua to modify my environment.
But weirdly enough it was this "one weird trick" in Ghostty that made me switch to it: different font sizes per panel split.
I don't know if the other terminal emulators eventually got that functionality, but that was such an important thing for me and made me switch.
Ghostty is so impressive to me. Definitely one of the better pieces of software that I have the joy to use.
I’m happy there’s a new release. There’s a bug that’s really been annoying me (global keybinds stop working on macOS after a little) and it’s supposed to be fixed now. (I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, but can’t wait!)
FYI for anyone building from source, the build instructions fail to mention the new -Dinstalled-exe-path= param you need to add if using a ~/.local build, otherwise the systemd unit won't work.