First impressions of Ghostty
There are two conflicting forces in play in setting up your computer environment:
- It’s worthwhile to pursue small improvements in frequently used tools.
- It’s not productive to get stuck tweaking your setup endlessly.
It’s common to find people get stuck at the extreme ends of the spectrum; some programmers refuse to configure or learn their tools at all, while others get stuck re-configuring their setups constantly without any productivity gains to show for it.
Finding a balance can be tricky. With regards to terminals I’ve been using alacritty for many years. It gets the job done but I don’t know if I’m missing out on anything? I’ve been meaning to look at alternatives like wezterm and kitty but I never got far enough to try them out.
On one hand it’s just a terminal, what difference could it make?
On the other hand, I spend countless of hours every day inside a terminal so even a small improvement should pay off in the long run.
Enter Ghostty, a terminal so hyped up it made me drop any useful things I was working on and see what the fuzz was about. I don’t quite get why people hype up a terminal of all things but here we are.
Ghostty didn’t revolutionize my setup or anything but I admit that Ghostty is quite nice and it has replaced alacritty as my terminal.
I just want a blank canvas without any decorations
One of the big selling points of Ghostty is its native platform integration. It’s supposed to integrate well with your window manager so it looks the same and gives you some extra functionality… But I don’t know why I should care—I just want a big square without decorations of any kind.
You’re supposed to to be able to simply turn off any window decorations:
window-decoration = false
At the moment there’s a bug that requires you set some weird GTK settings to fully remove the borders:
gtk-titlebar = false
gtk-adwaita = false
It’s unfortunate as I haven’t done any GKT configuration on my machine (I use XMonad as my window manager and I don’t have any window decorations anywhere).
Cursor invert
cursor-invert-fg-bg = true
In alacritty I’ve had the cursor invert the background and foreground and you can do that in Ghostty too.
I ran into an issue where it interferes with indent-blankline.nvim making the cursor very hard to spot in indents (taking the color of the indent guides, which is by design low contrast with the background).
Annoying but it gave me the shove I needed to try out different plugins to see if the problem persisted. I ended up with (an even nicer) setup using snacks.nvim that doesn’t hide the cursor:
Right: snacks.nvim (cursor visible and it highlights scope).
Minimum contrast
Unreadable ls output is a staple of the excellent Linux UX.
It might look like this:
Super annoying.
You can of course configure the ls output colors but that’s just for one program and it won’t automatically follow when you ssh to another server.
Ghostty’s minimum-contrast option ensures that the text and background always has enough contrast to be visible:
minimum-contrast = 1.05
Most excellent.
Hide cursor while typing
mouse-hide-while-typing = true
A small quality-of-life feature is the ability to hide the cursor when typing. I didn’t know I needed this in my life.
Consistent font sizing between desktop and laptop
With alacritty I have an annoying problem where I need to use a very different font size on my laptop and my desktop (8 and 12).
This wasn’t always the case and I think something may have changed in alacritty but I’m not sure.
Ghostty doesn’t have this problem and I can now use the same font settings across my machines (
font-size = 16
).
Ligature support
The issue for adding ligatures to alacritty was closed eight years ago and even though I wanted to try ligatures I couldn’t be bothered to “run a low quality fork”.
Ghostty seems like the opposite of “low quality” and it renders Iosevka’s ligatures very well:
Overall I feel that the font rendering in Ghostty is a little better than in alacritty, although that might be recency bias. I’m still undecided on ligatures but I love that I don’t have to feel limited by the terminal.
I use a custom Iosevka build with these Ghostty settings:
font-family = IosevkaTreeLig Nerd Font
font-style = Medium
font-style-bold = Bold
font-style-italic = Medium Italic
font-style-bold-italic = Bold Italic
font-size = 16
Colorscheme
While Ghostty has an absolutely excellent theme selector with a bunch of included themes (ghostty +list-themes) melange-nvim wasn’t included, so I had to configure the colorscheme myself.
It was fairly straightforward even though the palette = 0= syntax was a bit surprising:
# The dark variant of melange
background = #292522
foreground = #ECE1D7
palette = 0=#867462
palette = 1=#D47766
palette = 2=#85B695
palette = 3=#EBC06D
palette = 4=#A3A9CE
palette = 5=#CF9BC2
palette = 6=#89B3B6
palette = 7=#ECE1D7
palette = 8=#34302C
palette = 9=#BD8183
palette = 10=#78997A
palette = 11=#E49B5D
palette = 12=#7F91B2
palette = 13=#B380B0
palette = 14=#7B9695
palette = 15=#C1A78E
# I think it's nice to colorize the selection too
selection-background = #403a36
selection-foreground = #c1a78e
I’m happy with Ghostty
In the end Ghostty has improved my setup and I’m happy I took time to try it out. It took a little more time than “just launch it” but it absolutely wasn’t a big deal. The reward was a few pleasant improvements that have improved my life a little.
And perhaps most important of all: I’m now an alpha Nerd that uses a terminal written in Zig.