It seems like all content creators in the Linux space are covering Ghostty these days, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon. This post will be short and sweet ramblings based upon my first impressions. If you want a TheMKat flavored Ghostty post, read on.
What is this Ghostty you speak of?
Ghostty is yet another terminal emulator. Wait… Don't leave! While that sounds incredibly dull when you say it out loud, it is worth looking into. Features include hardware acceleration (GPU) for rendering, as well as using native UI elements (e.g, file menus). To me, some other features worth pointing out are:
- Reasonable resource usage. Like Alacritty (which has some commonalities), it is quite minimal and lightweight w.r.t resource usage.
- Dead-simple configuration. The configuration is easy to read, easy to understand, and do what is expected. Many other terminal emulators either have a GUI driven way of doing configurations (like iTerm2) or do not support sequences of bindings like Emacs (e.g, Alacritty if I'm not too stupid to find it).
- Key-bindings actually support sequences!!!(!!!!!!!) This is incredible to me, as I use Emacs btw. I love using sequences of keys like
ctrl x 2 M-x 3to do stuff that give other people the ick. Ghostty supports this, so I can usectrl-x 2to split my windows into multiple terminals (yes, just like Emacs! weee). - Friendly to those people who prefer graphical gizmos. You can do most operations from the GUI, except the terminal commands themselves (duh!). While this is not me, I think having a diverse user base is a net positive.
- It being a Zig codebase. Probably not important to most of you, but I think it is awesome that there is a Zig project getting this much coverage! Zig is a cool programming language that has some really neat ideas (e.g, sending allocator objects as parameters where you need memory allocation. Makes for really flexible use cases in different platforms. Maybe you want to use the standard heap allocator one place, and maybe an arena allocator with a pre-defined memory area for another place? Or make your own custom weird allocator? Anyway, these parenthesis is getting too long with me just mentioning how cool Zig is. You should probably check out Zig if you have not tried it already! And no, my favorite language these days is still Rust
)
Configuration
You are reading my blog for some reason, and not the official docs, so my guess is that you want to hear about my configuration. Reading other peoples configurations is what usually helps me when experimenting with new applications like this.
Theme
While I'm not super-pleased with it yet, I made a quick theme based upon my pink-bliss-uwu theme for Emacs (which is based upon the earlier pink-bliss theme by someone else).
background = ffe4e1 foreground = 8b008b cursor-color = ffc0cb selection-background = ffc0cb selection-foreground = 942092
It ends up looking like the following:
Emacs like window splitting and Windmove-like navigation
In Ghostty we use the keybind configuration item to create keybindings. As Ghostty supports sequences, we can easily make C-x 2 and the rest of the window splitting work like in Emacs. We simply use + to combine keys, and > to mark the separation of each part of the sequence. ctrl+x>2 would therefore be the same as the C-x 2 notation that Emacs users are familiar with. Window splitting horizontally and vertically, with Windmove navigation, would therefore translate to:
keybind = ctrl+x>2=new_split:right keybind = ctrl+x>3=new_split:up keybind = super+left=goto_split:left keybind = super+right=goto_split:right keybind = super+up=goto_split:top keybind = super+down=goto_split:bottom
This ends up behaving like the following:
The sudden right-up movement instead if straight up might be a bug. Unsure, as I'm in the process of tweaking and testing many weird configuration options at the moment
The rest of the configuration
My current configuration with comments is found below:
# getting a blocky cursor instead of the simple dash adjust-cursor-thickness=5000% window-theme = light # The theme pasted above theme = /Users/marie/pink-bliss-ghost # Use a cutesy font font-family = Monaspace Radon Var unfocused-split-opacity = 0.35 unfocused-split-fill = ffc0cb mouse-hide-while-typing = true window-padding-x = 50 window-padding-y = 50 # Emacs like splits and Windmove navigation keybind = ctrl+x>2=new_split:right keybind = ctrl+x>3=new_split:up keybind = super+left=goto_split:left keybind = super+right=goto_split:right keybind = super+up=goto_split:top keybind = super+down=goto_split:bottom keybind = alt+up=scroll_page_lines:-2 keybind = alt+down=scroll_page_lines:2 keybind = super+shift+left=previous_tab keybind = super+shift+right=next_tab keybind = super+r=reload_config
Have you tried Ghostty? Feel free to share your initial ramblings in the comments
