Ghostty

Ghostty 1.4 landed Oct 27 with transparent scrollback compression and Kitty-style animated graphics, and the new KDE terminal Kwi is being built on its libghostty-vt library. Users are weighing the Ubuntu 24.04 support drop and debating how well Ghostty's performance claims hold up.

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Ghostty is getting automatic scrollback compression, resulting in 70 to 90% less physical memory usage. It happens increMitchell Hashimoto

Ghostty 1.4 lands Oct 27 with 2,889 commits from 172 contributors

The 1.4.0 Release Notes cover 7 months of work and confirm Ghostty, via libghostty, is "the first terminal to do this outside of Kitty itself" on graphics support. The notes also detail the scrollback compression work, noting "Ghostty now transparently compresses scrollback that isn't visible" and that "compression only runs while the terminal" is idle. Mitchell Hashimoto led with "Full Kitty graphics with animation (the first terminal besides Kitty to do it)" and scrollback compression that he says shrinks scrollback "~90+% on average," a figure he first previewed back in July, when he posted that the feature gives "70 to 90% less physical memory usage" and "happens incrementally when idle, so it had no measurable effect on IO throughput." The underlying code landed via PR #13264, an 18-commit branch titled "terminal: scrollback page compression (70 to 90% memory savings)" that Hashimoto merged himself in July. The Hacker News thread hit 1,358 points and 446 comments, and r/Ghostty gave it 287 upvotes, topped by u/joelparkerhenderson: "Thanks, this fixes the macOS tab collapse issue." (32 upvotes). It also settles an Oct 7 HN complaint, "No new Ghostty updates since March," where Hashimoto explained the 6-month cycle and said 1.4 slipped from late September because of family travel and lagging localization PRs.

Ghostty 1.4 drops Ubuntu 24.04 LTS support, and some users still won't switch

Tux Machines flags the 24.04 drop, and an r/Ghostty commenter noted it was "Not yet under Homebrew…" (6 upvotes) at the time of posting. On HN, jaywcarman says Kitty's hints mode "is the one feature keeping me from switching from Kitty to Ghostty." Comparisons like grigio's "Which is the Best Linux terminal?" keep Ghostty in the shortlist, and matip_dev calls it "el nuevo hype" in a TikTok with 154 likes.

KDE's Eike Hein starts Kwi, a terminal built on libghostty-vt

In a Nov 1 Planet KDE post, also mirrored on KDE Blogs, Hein writes "I've started work on a new KDE application" that builds on libghostty-vt, calling it "designed to provide users of KDE Plasma and other free desktops with a modern and fast terminal." He details the stack further: "Kwi builds on libghostty-vt from the excellent Ghostty project and familiar, mature KDE Frameworks such as KPty," with "a very speedy GPU-accelerated (Vulkan or OpenGL) renderer powered by the Qt Scene Graph" and a UI "built with the latest and greatest" Kirigami. The KDE/kwi GitHub repo describes it as "Modern and fast terminal for KDE Plasma and other desktops" that "also provides modern and fast terminal components for embedding to KDE/Qt developers." Linuxiac's Bobby Borisov describes it as experimental, and Phoronix headlines "3x To 35x Performance." Hacker News was more skeptical across 43 points: notorandit wrote "For kwi to win I would expect both more features and fewer computing resources."

Hashimoto reproduces a libghostty-vt benchmark and concedes most of it

He told @theodorvaryag on Oct 30 that he would try to find time to look. On Nov 2 he posted "I was able to reproduce most of your results, with one major asterisk": the harness runs libghostty-vt "in zero-scrollback mode" (138 likes). The scrollback-compression mechanics he's referring to are caller-driven, per libghostty's Terminal docs, which note "the terminal exposes an opaque activity token so an embedding application can restart an idle timer" controlling when compression kicks in, consistent with the C API Hashimoto introduced in PR #11506 ("libghostty: add initial C API for terminal, formatter"). His thank-you reply, "good engineering is about making others in the field better," drew 441 likes and 43,036 views. In a follow-up (80 likes), he called libghostty-vt "the main performance crown jewel for Ghostty" and said he tested only VT throughput, not startup time or input latency. Ghostty's own About page frames the architecture behind all of this: "the core of Ghostty is a cross-platform, C-ABI compatible library called libghostty," with the macOS app in Swift/AppKit/SwiftUI and the Linux app in Zig/GTK4, both linking against the same C API that Kwi and other embedders now draw on.

r/Ghostty untangles "The Ghostty Team Just Replaced Their Own Terminal?"

That thread drew 97 upvotes and 49 comments. Its top answer came from u/PatagonianCowboy: "Rex is a terminal multiplexer that uses (lib)ghostty" (46 upvotes). u/philosophical_lens added "Apparently it's invite only and not even clear if it's OSS" (16 upvotes) and linked superlogical.com. In the "Can Ghostty replace Tmux?" thread, u/8bitreboot says "The people behind Ghostty are working on a multiplexer called Rex" (43 upvotes). Sam Natale's same-titled beta walkthrough (55,783 views) credits "the Superlogic team headed by Mitchell Hashimoto," per its auto-generated transcript.

cmux pitches a Ghostty-built home for Claude Code agents and is hiring

An Oct 10 reel from rishav.cyber (50 views) describes cmux as "a native macOS terminal built on the Ghostty engine." The reel says it runs Claude Code, Codex and Gemini side by side and claims "28,000+ stars since January." 1752vc Careers lists a Founding Chromium Engineer at cmux to own Windows and Linux. A separate Zero G Talent listing for a Manaflow role with the same title pays $130K-$170K and includes "Port Ghostty terminal core and agent features to Windows."

Ghostty Designer pulls 202 upvotes by giving Ghostty a visual config editor

The r/Ghostty post hit 202 upvotes, with u/geto_princ admitting "I was struggling trying to understand how ghostty themes work." @wangchujiang shared it on Threads alongside the iglass theme (36 likes). ghostty-config 2.0 followed Nov 1 with 71 upvotes. Ansub Khan (1,951 views) frames the need bluntly: "there's no setting screen, not one button."