Ghostty First Impression

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2024-12-28 13:00:04

Recently, Ghostty released its first public version, and many are hyped about it. Ghostty is written in the Zig programming language.

At the time of writing this article, Ghostty is still in the unstable branch on Manjaro. I used AUR to install it and noticed that it requires the pandoc-cli package to build Ghostty. pandoc-cli has over 100 Haskell dependencies. Instead, install the pandoc-bin package before building Ghostty.

The main advantage is that Ghostty works without requiring much time to configure using a configuration file.(Ghostty zero-configuration philosophy )

Overall, it’s a great terminal. However, I’m still using Alacritty with Tmux because I’m already familiar with that setup and feel it’s faster than Ghostty (although I haven’t run any benchmarks). Alacritty doesn’t support image rendering, ligatures, or native terminal multiplexing. If you prefer a feature-rich, zero-configuration terminal, I think Ghostty is the best choice.