YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I know for many folks they like the fact that it is cross platform (works on mac/linux) etc and gpu acceleration which is really nice to have.

The terminal ecosystem needs to change, and these terminals support a lot of cool features. Ghostty's pure reusable terminal state machine being a source of truth, Kitty graphics, Wezterm and its mux domains & lua config, lots of cool ideas there.

Having having an industry player like hashimoto's superlogical driving terminal features is the extreme version of that

vouch this comment since this is a pretty common question people have, I don't believe it should be dead.

Ghostty is so much better than iTerm2! Don't get me started...

I don't think Konsole is actually faster than Kitty or Alacritty. Kitty is really nice and an innovator in a lot of terminal standards. It's also non-commercial and not related to any sort of startup (not that Konsole is either). It's definitely my first choice of the bunch, followed by Alacritty.

I use Linux at home and Mac at work. I use Ghostty simply to have the same terminal on both systems.

There's always gonna be something that's better, faster, bigger, badder, stronger, thicker, firmer, etc., and terminals really aren't one of those things where I am interested in exhaustively testing all of them to find the truly greatest one. A terminal is also one of those things where if you find one that is perfectly adequate then there's little motivation to even bother using trying one. And there's the whole "devil you know" aspect. The only reason I rarely try a different terminal is if the stock terminal on whatever OS I'm using lacks some basic niceties that should be expected in the year 2026.

I like Ghostty because I find it both fast and configurable, and it's multi-platform without treating macOS like the red headed step child. I also appreciate how its configuration is text-based, which I prefer to someone's opinion of how a configuration GUI should behave, and I think it's good the developers aren't wasting a second of their time thinking about a configuration GUI.

cute little mascots

The advertised point is it needs zero config to work outside of the box. For example nerd fonts are included by default whereas you need to install them if you are using let’s say iterm2.

It works well, that’s my only requirement. I could ask you the same, what’s the point of Konsole, what value does it bring?

Can konsole do the fancy shader and inline images? I think that's all that distinguishes the others but I may be overlooking things.

Kitty is really nice, a programmable terminal that does everything I want, GPU rendering, etc. Haven't used Ghostty yet but one of its advantages is libghostty, modern terminal emulation as a library.

> libghostty: a cross-platform, minimal dependency library that exposes a C API so feature-rich, correct, and fast terminal functionality can be embedded by any application anywhere.

Oh the author actually posted about it just now in rich detail. It's pretty exciting for people who spend much of their time in the terminal.

A couple of annoyances I've had shipping CLI apps to Konsole users:

1. By default, Konsole disables OSC8 link support. Users can enable it manually, but you need to ship fallbacks by default since otherwise the default users will have a broken experience. Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm, etc all ship working OSC8 support out of the box.

2. No built-in Nerd Font support, so if you want to render icons, you need to tell your users to set up a patched font or else have fallbacks. Ghostty and WezTerm ship built-in Nerd Font fallbacks if your configured font isn't patched.

That being said Konsole is much better than most emulators. iTerm2 is not bad, although it lacks Symbols for Legacy Computing Unicode support (which all of the above have, including Konsole, and which is very useful for drawing prettier terminal UIs). The worst by far is Apple Terminal, truly the IE6 of terminal emulators.

For me it's simply that iTerm2 got really fat over the years, and Ghostty was a nice and slim alternative - plus it has one of the better Kitty Graphics Protocol implementations which is fun to tinker with. e.g.: https://github.com/floooh/chipz-kitty (needs zig-0.17.0).

The point for me is each one can have ten or so claudes, so any one crashing doesn't take down all the claudes ... and I don't have to learn tmux.

for terminals I personally am using kitty, but libghostty is great and powers ghostel in emacs which is amazing. Also note if you start trying to look at unicode correctness, in my experience ghostty is in general the best among all alternatives.

1) Personal preferences: different terminals come with different defaults, some people do not want to tinker with the settings, so they just stick with whatever immediately clicks.

2) Technical curiosity: some people probably started their own terminal project just for the fuck of having made their own - and they eventually gained a userbase.

3) Feature set: Most terminals implement most features these days, but at the time these projects started, you'd have a feature matrix between features and terminals because most terminals lacked some features; so people would pick whatever suited their needs.

Personally I've been using kitty for years mostly due to 3), at the time I chose my forever terminal, I evaluated like 12 different ones, and kitty was the only one that covered most of my needs without feeling like it suffers from random quirks, and I like that it has built-in terminal multiplexer (a'la tmux) and emoji picker.

For me, the main reason to use Ghostty is simply that mouse support works right out of the box. In Konsole clicking a spot to move the cursor only works if you're using Bash. While it also works with the Fish Shell on Ghostty.

> Konsole is way faster than any of those on my computer and it has all the usual suspects I'd expect from a modern terminal emulator.

Same boat here, though I also get to enjoy some of the benefits of libghostty, via ghostel in Emacs. Ghostel is noticeably faster when there's a lot of output being dumped, but I don't often need the speed and use it only because it's integrated rather well into the rest of my Emacs.

> tmux -CC integration

If you can stomach Emacs, there are at least two packages that implement this, one via eat and another via vterm, though none via ghostel just yet. Shouldn't be difficult to port, though.

I assume that this depends on your computer/GPU/GPU driver.

I have used Konsole for many years and I have used kitty for about 2 years in 2024/2025, then I have switched to ghostty around the beginning of 2026.

At least in my computers (with NVIDIA GPUs and Gentoo Linux), kitty was many times faster than Konsole and Ghostty even faster.

Moreover, in the now somewhat distant past when I was still using Konsole, it did not have some font rendering features that I desired, but that might have been solved meanwhile.

A reason why the terminal emulator speed is important for me is that I frequently compile big software projects and I find it unacceptable for a compilation to be slowed down by the low speed at which the compiler output is displayed on the terminal window, which happened frequently with all terminal emulators older than kitty and ghostty.

I was sceptical for decades as well. But they are amazing - no more closing the xterm by mistake. I'm using those because I wanted for example a single window with THREE consoles open at once AND being able to handle some ANSI crazy theming.

Xterm failed me :( Tabby just works.

I don't know Konsole, but kitty have tons of features other "plain" terminals lack. It's not just about speed (which I never got the obsession about either)

Sure enough, one minute later he posted a comment lol

But could it do two rows of tabs?

I'm super excited for you and this, but this is mostly a highlight list of who is using your library. I was kind of excited to read about the actual changes to the library but I suppose I can go read the changelog on my own.

> Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: [...] freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).

That's really cool, but I'm drawing a blank; what's it used for? Embedded terminal something?

the web version powers our quickstart via a cloudflare websocket and some custom patches (only on desktop): https://hotaisle.xyz/quick-start

it is all open source: https://github.com/hotaisle/hotaisle-website

Thanks for the work on getting libghostty 1.4 out! :D

Wanted to add too that I can't wait for xterm to eventually support libghostty, you've been super supportive providing feedback!

https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/issues/5686

Any source/screenshots?

> Escape codes are the new html for browsers now called terminal emulators.

Not really and that isn't a good thing in the long run.

There should not be any more complexity in a terminal emulator that will just lead attackers to craft RCEs exploits to your terminal to steal your secrets on your computer just because "Its cool" and has hundreds of escape codes.