Ghostty

Ghostty is a terminal emulator designed to eliminate the traditional trade-offs between speed, features, and native platform integration. While most terminal emulators force users to choose between these qualities, Ghostty delivers competitive performance in all three areas without compromise. It provides standards-compliant terminal emulation with comprehensive xterm compatibility, making it a drop-in replacement for existing terminal emulators.

Performance is a key strength of Ghostty, featuring a multi-renderer architecture that uses Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux. The terminal maintains around 60fps under heavy load and includes a dedicated IO thread for consistent performance during intensive operations like large file processing. Benchmarks show it's 4x faster than iTerm and Kitty, and 2x faster than Terminal.app for plain text operations, while matching Alacritty's speed with significantly more features.

Ghostty takes a platform-native approach rather than using a lowest-common-denominator design. The macOS version is built as a true SwiftUI application with native windowing, menu bars, and settings GUI, while the Linux version uses GTK. Both platforms support advanced windowing features including multi-window support, tabbing, and splits. The project also includes libghostty, a C-compatible library for embedding terminal functionality in third-party applications, making it valuable for developers building terminal-integrated tools.

Installation

# via Official Download
Visit https://ghostty.org/download for platform-specific installers