published the first stable release of the terminal emulator ghostty , remarkable to use the GPU to accelerate the drawing of the contents. The author of Ghostty is trying to embody three qualities in one application – high performance, extensive functionality and an interface that looks relative to each supported platform. The project code is written in Zig and is distributed under the MIT license. Ready assemblies formed for linux and macOS.
The GTK library is involved in the interface in the Linux training camp, and the Swiftui frames for MacOS, which allowed the use of dialogs, menu, styling of windows and interface for changing settings for each platform. To accelerate the drawing in Linux, the graphic API Opengl is used, and in MacOS – Metal. Productivity also increases due to the use of a separate input/output flow.
Ghostty was faster in the tests.
Terminal emulators iterm and kitty 4 times 4 times , and terminal.app – 2 twice, when the contents of the contents of the large file are displayed, for example, in Help “Cat Big_file.txt”. Compared to alacritty Ghostty performance was approximately at the same level, but at the same time Ghostty provides richer functionality.
The terminal can be displayed by Emoji, Hyperlinks, Complex graphems and ligature (the merger of several characters into one, for example,” æ “). To display images directly in the terminal, the protocol kitty can be used. To embed Ghostty functionality in other applications, Libghostty library develops, compatible with projects in SI and allows you to quickly integrate the terminal emulator into its products.
The interface supports dark and bright design topics, separation of the window for simultaneously displaying several sessions, switching between sessions using tabs. The terminal complies with the requirement of the standard ecma-4 , but also supports the expansion standard and also supports the expansion standard and escape-sequence, for example, proposed in XTERM.