Some Typometer measurements on i3 here:

  # Title                   Min     Max     Avg     SD
  1 xterm 397               3.1     4.0     3.5     0.2
  2 Alacritty 0.15.1        3.6     4.8     4.2     0.2
  3 xfce4-terminal 1.1.4    2.9     6.8     4.4     0.3
  4 Ghostty 1.2.0           11.3    15.5    13.0    0.7
  5 kitty 0.42.2            11.7    21.3    15.8    3.3

https://imgur.com/a/RobYTWY

lower is better

https://github.com/frarees/typometer

Typometer

Typometer is a tool to measure and analyze the visual latency of text editors.

Editor latency is the delay between an input event and a corresponding screen update — in particular, the delay between keystroke and character appearance. While there are many kinds of delays (caret movement, line editing, etc.), typing latency is a major predictor of editor usability.

Check the article typing with pleasure to learn more about editor latency and its effects on typing performance.

> While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three. In all categories, I am not trying to claim that Ghostty is the best (i.e. the fastest, most feature-rich, or most native). But Ghostty is competitive in all three categories and Ghostty doesn't make you choose between them.

Ghostty doesn’t claim to be the fastest.

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

> But Ghostty is competitive in all three categories

Being at the bottom is not what I call competitive.

It’s above kitty? From the numbers posted earlier

Bonus VS Code:

  # Title      Min     Max     Avg     SD
  1 VS Code    10.8    19.7    13.0    1.2

It broke on upgrade - all built-in themes now have different names, but so far so good.

ghostty +list-themes

https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#breakin...

Yeah, I first upgraded, then read this article, and then, when it broke, I saw the release notes. Thanks!

As someone who spends most of my time remoted in to other machines, it's very hard to give up the deep tmux integration on iTerm 2, but I do cast a wandering gaze at Ghostty now and then. I know some people think tmux is a dead-end so if an alternative ever really gains traction I could be convinced to switch.

It's projects like this that make me feel awe. I'm a full stack developer, but I feel like I don't have the low level knowledge to know all the work that goes into a project like a terminal emulator.

I love the app on my Mac, can't wait to go home and try it out

> Ghostty 1.3 will continue the focus of making Ghostty the "best existing terminal emulator" by shipping the last remaining major missing features to achieve parity with other popular terminal emulators. Namely, we plan on shipping scrollback search and scrollbars for 1.3, at a minimum.

Are scrollback and scrollbars that hard to implement? Or do people just don't care that much about them that they are only added in 1.3?

I tried using various terminal emulators which don't support scrollback and scrollbars with tmux (which apparently most people do as a substitute). However for me that falls apart as soon as you SSH to a remote host and need to use tmux there as well. Maybe I'm just a console-noob...

There's no scrollbar but scrollback works with alt+page_up or scrolling with the mouse wheel or touchpad. They do mention they'll implement scrollback search and scrollbars in 1.3.

Yup, I tried Ghostty and found no find--uninstalled and waiting. Good to see they mentioned it in the 1.2 notes for 1.3

There's a lot of great engineering that goes into Ghostty (not just in the codebase itself, but also in how the project is managed and run).

It's a lot of fun following it, just to gleam best practices from.

Nice, I've been running nightly to get access to the cursor shaders. I've found them really helpful, especially when screen sharing.

It look's like a good terminal emulator. The sad part is that on Linux it is Gnome only.

What do you mean? It uses Gtk but can be used from other desktop environments.

It uses libadwaita which is a GNOME only library. It will run on others GTK environments but won't match the UI styles.

I'm using it on Arch with Hyperland just fine.

Ghostty is both the greatest terminal emulator and Zig product ever made

still no search on MacOs, is it?

Not yet

https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

can you ctrl-f now?

Nope, it's planned for 1.3

Seems it is in every distro except the debians and fedoras, the ones I use. Also no GUI config. Guess I’ll wait a while.

I tried the app image once, and it looked promising.