Switching to Ghostty Terminal (OMG)

I finally lost my shit at Warp yesterday.

I’ve used Warp as my terminal app for about three years and have been getting increasingly pissed off at their ongoing efforts to turn my terminal into a fancy AI-enabled everything-machine.

I understand why – nobody ever got rich by building a terminal app. But when a mistyped ls -a causes my terminal to say “You’re absoluteley right - let me search online for a better solution” I’m gonna look for a terminal which is just a fucking terminal.

And so I found Ghostty. Which is exactly what I should always have been using as a terminal.

• It’s fast as hell.
• It’s just a terminal. It doesn’t interfere with my shell.
• It plays so well with my OS (unlike every other terminal app I’ve used). There’s a great piece on this here.
• The three things above are basically what drove Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp) to work on a really good terminal instead of something more lucrative.

Configuration

Took all of five minutes…

font-family = "Operator Mono"
font-size = 18
window-padding-x = 10
window-padding-y = 10
window-padding-color = background
window-padding-balance = true
theme = "iTerm2 Pastel Dark Background"
adjust-cell-height = 15%
window-save-state = always
background-opacity = 0.95
macos-titlebar-style = tabs

My Favourite Features

The fact I can manage splits like a normal mac user rather than a tmux nerd. These keyboard shortcuts are basically the only “features” I use and it’s bloody lovely.

• ⌘ + Enter - Toggle Fullscreen
• ⌘ + Shift + \ - Show All Tabs
• ⌘ + D - Split Right
• ⌘ + Shft + D - Split Down
• ⌘ + Shft + Enter - Zoom Current Split
• ⌘ + [ - Next split
• ⌘ + ] - Previous Split
• ⌥ + Click - Place Cursor

All the other OS-native shortcuts work as expected, it’s fast and reliable, and most important of all I haven’t noticed my terminal app at all since I started using Ghostty.

Theo Browne has an interesting video with a load more context if you wanna dig deeper.