Pardon my ignorance, is the default terminal that comes with my PopOS also a “terminal emulator” and Ghostty is a replacement for that?
Yes. But it doesn’t have to replace your default terminal emulator. You can have multiple and use any of them.
We need to stop this usage of proprietary. MS GitHub + Discord in free software. It completely undermines the philosophy.
The rampant use of Discord in FLOSS project is really disheartening. To join yet another Discord channel to receive any kind of support or discussions around the project, is off-putting.
Discord is the worst. The siloing of tons of information that should be publicly searchable and accessible via a public forum, but instead it’s siloed off into this closed wall with shitty search.
I actually wish Lemmy was better searchable as well. I think Lemmy could be way better and drive adoption if it had a cross instance search engine / indexer.
If your instance is federated well, how does Lemmy not already have the search you’re speaking of?
Like, IRC exists and it just as useful to me as discord. Set up a wiki for FAQ’s and documentation.
You’re not alone with your opinion.
Indeed.
GPU-Accelerated Terminal Emulator
So is Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm, and even iTerm.
The README’s About section[0] sheds no light on what sets Ghostty apart from the competition, while using vague terms and marketing hyperboles.
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty?tab=readme-ov-file#about
I tried it, and it worked well when I worked locally. But I can’t use it to SSH into my server, a lot of things just don’t work.
SSHing to machines with bash seems to work fine, but it’s a problem with ones that use fish, for some reason
I can connect with SSH, but I can’t open
nanoorw3mfor example when I’m connected.Sounds like you have an issue with your PATH for the user you’re sshing as. What does ‘/usr/bin/echo $PATH’ output when run via ssh to your server?
… or TERM?
You can do something like this:
TERM=xterm-256color ssh user@hostYou could also install or copy over the term files or something. I can’t recall. But it’s the same as getting kitty to work which has more information online.
Finally a gpu accelerated Terminal emulator with tabbing.
Wezterm has tabs.
Is wezterm gpu accelerated?
Yes
Thanks
Kitty has tabs
ohhh, I didnt know that thanks but Ghostty has Zero config by default which i like
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FYI “riced out” is a pretty racist term.
Thanks for the info. Sincerely did not know.
Since the mods deleted my post, I’ll repeat what I wrote, because aside from the unintentional racism, I feel like I made some valid points.
GPU accelerated terminal emulators are already quite popular and if you use alacrity, kitty, or wez, then you already use them. They can help with not only cool effects like smooth scrolling and transparency, but also with massive text files. Handling an 8gb text file is complicated, and using a GPU can help with that.
Ghostty’s selling points are not just the GPU acceleration, since that’s actually fairly standard nowadays. They are: (from their about page)
Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.
I for one am very excited for this terminal and can’t wait to see what kind of development comes out of it!
Removed by mod
That’s obviously a backronym? The wikipedia page makes it clear it’s an offensive term.
TIL, thanks for sharing that.
It’s still racist when you make it an acronym. We know the term originally came from a racist term for Asian vehicles.
TIL, thanks!
Thank you 👏
And I thank you, Norah. As an Asian woman, any Linux space can feel pretty unwelcoming sometimes. Most of the time it’s the sexism, but this insistence on saying “ricing” is just another reminder that many in this space enjoy a bit of racism on the side, too.
I don’t usually say anything; I’m personally too afraid of being dragged into an endless “debate”. Perhaps a bit cowardly on my part. So, I appreciate you pointing it out first.
TIL
I thought it meant granular modification as in rice grains.
I case you didn’t see the other comments, this is a backronym to give people an excuse to say it isn’t actually racist. It comes from modding Japanese cars, referring to them as rice because they’re Asian. It’s pretty racist.
What would be the best foss for Android ?
Do you mean best FOSS terminal for Android? To my knowledge, there’s only really Termux.
What is the deal with getting gpu acceleration into a terminal emulator of all things? Of all the innovations that we could use, faster drawing of text doesn’t feel like it should be a priority.
My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.
I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.
GPU rendered text interfaces are pretty ubiquitous already. You can find that in IDEs, browsers, apps and GUIs of OSs. Drawing pixels is still a job the GPU excels at. No matter whether it’s just text. So I don’t see a point why we shouldn’t apply that to terminal emulators as well.
ok but such a sensational announcement like this suggests that before (and without) gpu acceleration the program was noticeably slow for some reason
Have you ever been in a terminal, or VSCode, and started tailing a super-fast log, and control-C takes forever to stop it while a CPU core goes crazy?
Text rendering isn’t efficient, and GPUs help.
It’s not just about speed, but also (battery) efficiency.
Even if you don’t notice the speed, if you are working on anything but a modern expensive laptop, you will notice the difference in battery draw between:
VS Code > NeoVim in traditional terminal > Neovim in Alacritty or Ghostty
text is like the slowest thing to draw :P when debugging games, a running log can make the 3D rendering stutter significantly.
See the minecraft f3 menu for a notorious example
no, that’s just minecraft being badly made. I’m talking logs running in a separate window.
But thats different, the issue there isn’t the text drawing, its that it isn’t meaningfully asynchronous and console drawing is typically blocking (at least on windows)
that’s true, but the impact would still be lessened by faster rendering. and as someone who spends all day in the terminal anyway, i do see the benefits often.
That’s what I would have said till I tried using a TUI epub reader. The jankiness of line-level scrolling (rather than pixel-level like in a GUI app) is all but a deal breaker.
I was then most surprised to discover that terminal emulators with this amazing cutting-edge technology (smooth scrolling) do not even exist.
I’m not against it, but another factor that we should check in a terminal emulator (as a tool where you run everything from) is the system requirements.
I’m using urxvt and that’s so easy on the system, it starts instantly. I can open multiple instances without worrying about the system resources.
I believe it uses X.org’s text rendering. X.org uses OpenGL under the hood. It’s not CPU rendered.
Alacrity felt bulkier when I tried. I will try this too though.
Alacritty felt too slow and was missing settings I wanted (like mousewheel scroll) due to devs being opinionated. Kitty has been fast and flexible for me.
4k 120 fps ?
And HDR
Unless it is trying to actually look cool like “cool retro terminal” or something, I fail to see how the point. I don’t recall ever in the history of my terminal use ever thinking “man, this terminal emulator is so slow!” I mean, really… 120fps 4k terminals. Neat I guess?
That’s not what GPU acceleration is used for.
This. If you hadn’t written it …
Nice this project was always interesting! Seems very feature rich, glad it’s out of that invite only stage
