Ghostty is a free, open-source terminal emulator led by Mitchell Hashimoto. It uses each platform's native interface — a SwiftUI app with a Metal renderer on macOS, a GTK app with an OpenGL renderer on Linux — and GPU acceleration. The project is MIT-licensed, has about 63,700 GitHub stars, and its 1.4 release (27 October 2026) reached 1,358 points and 447 comments on Hacker News, one of the most-discussed developer releases of the past weeks.
What's new in 1.4, according to the release notes (7 months of work, 172 contributors, 2,889 commits):
- Scrollback compression: idle history is compressed, cutting resident memory by 70–90% for typical text on macOS and 64-bit Linux; the default scrollback limit rises from 10 MB to 50 MB.
- Speed: plain ASCII parsing is about 5.7x faster; printing a 150 MB file on macOS dropped from 1.5 s to 566 ms.
- Kitty graphics: animation and relative placements, which the project says gives it 100% of the published Kitty graphics spec.
ghostty +ssh: an ssh wrapper that installs Ghostty's terminfo on remote hosts, so colours and keys work over SSH.- macOS 27 fixes, a new threaded EGL renderer on Linux, drag-and-drop splits on GTK, and fixes for ten security advisories.
How to try it: on macOS, brew install --cask ghostty or the signed .dmg from ghostty.org/download (macOS 13 or newer). Linux users can use distribution packages or Flatpak listed on the download page. Its engine, libghostty-vt, is a separate library other apps can embed; the project says it builds on macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android and WebAssembly and plans a 1.0 tag soon.
Limits: there is no Windows version of the Ghostty app and no roadmap for one. On Linux, 1.4 needs GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7, which Ubuntu 24.04 LTS does not meet (the notes suggest Flatpak or an older version). Some shortcuts and the copy-on-select setting changed. Day-to-day development has moved off GitHub, which is now a read-only mirror. The project is a non-profit fiscally sponsored by Hack Club; the next release, 1.5, is planned for March 2027.
