This video reviews "Ghosty," a newly released terminal emulator, highlighting its features, customization options, and performance across different operating systems. Ghosty is presented as a fast, feature-rich, and native terminal emulator, supporting Mac OS (SwiftUI) and Linux (Zig/GTK4). Key features include GPU-accelerated rendering, built-in themes, ligature support, and particularly, automatic integration of the Kitty Graphics protocol for image rendering. While it boasts zero configuration for basic use, customization through a config file is demonstrated for themes, fonts, and window decorations. A speed comparison against other popular terminal emulators like Alacritty and Kitty shows Ghosty performing comparably but not consistently faster in the presenter's time tree / benchmark. The reviewer concludes that Ghosty is a cool project, potentially excellent for Mac users due to its native UI and blur effects, but on Linux, it offers similar functionality to other emulators unless specific features like Kitty Graphics are desired.
Summarizing Ghosty: A New Terminal Emulator
0:02 Introduction to Ghosty: The video introduces Ghosty, a terminal emulator the presenter has been using for a couple of weeks and finds fast, noting its growing popularity among YouTubers.
1:04 Platform Support & Configuration: Ghosty is a brand-new project, currently in version 1.0, available on Mac OS (using Swift/Apple Kit) and Linux (using Zig/GTK4); there is no Windows support. It's touted as "zero configuration required" but allows extensive customization via a config file for themes, fonts, and key bindings.
2:00 Key Features: Ghosty is described as fast, feature-rich, and native. Its "native" aspect means it uses platform-specific GUI toolkits for better integration and performance.
3:42 Advanced Capabilities: A major selling point is its automatic support for the Kitty Graphics protocol, enabling direct image rendering in the terminal without plugins. It also features GPU-accelerated rendering, built-in themes, ligature support, and automatic light/dark mode switching based on the desktop environment.
6:39 Wide Linux Support: Ghosty is easily installable, with official support for many Linux distributions including Arch, Gentoo, NixOS, Void Linux, and Fedora.
8:29 Default User Interface: The default Ghosty UI includes a top toolbar with tab support, a main menu for actions like inspecting the terminal or reloading config, and a split-pane feature. It also has a "view open tabs" feature similar to GNOME's overview.
11:03 Customization Demo: The presenter demonstrates his custom Ghosty configuration, which removes window decorations (title bars and tabs by default), sets a specific font, and uses the Nu shell.
13:20 Extensive Themes: Ghosty offers a large selection of built-in themes (e.g., Dracula), which can be listed using + list themes and easily applied by copying the theme name into the config file.
15:35 Performance Test: A speed test running time tree / on the root partition revealed that Ghosty, while fast, was not consistently the fastest, with Alacritty and Kitty often showing similar or slightly better performance in this specific benchmark.
20:00 Conclusion: Ghosty is a "pretty good" terminal emulator, especially for Mac OS users who can leverage its native blur effects. For Linux users, it's a solid choice, particularly if the Kitty Graphics engine is a desired feature or if one simply wants to try something new, but it doesn't offer a significant speed advantage over existing fast emulators.