Hacker News

points by dimator 2 days ago | 0 comments

i tried ghostty, rio, wezterm, they all stuck for about a month or so... then the subtle usability issues become too much, and i wonder why i switched from iterm2 to begin with. there's something to be said for years of polish, and feature work that is well-baked.

iterm2 is fast, reliable, and second nature. i don't have to edit settings every day.

[–] merb 2 days ago

btw I used iterm2 for years as well and sometimes tried others.

I now use ghostty it’s faster definitely. Yes it has some quirks which is hard to overcome as a iterm2 user. But I could live with it. I think ghostty is basically also the only alternative to iterm2

[–] s4i 2 days ago

While I'm not a hard core terminal emulator expert or tweaker, it was a bit of a learning curve to get into Ghostty after iTerm2. I hope this latest release makes it easier to edit the splits, haven't tested yet.

But the biggest thing that made me stay on Ghostty was that there's a freaking config file. With iTerm you had to export the profile and keybindings, and then import them on a new system which was clumsy, and easy to forget. Now ghostty.config is just one of my dotfiles, with a clear understandable git history, I love it.

[–] wpm 2 days ago

There's ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist and it's always been there

[–] s4i 1 day ago

OK that's the file I've been backing up and importing I believe. But it's in a binary format. There's `plutil -p ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist` but that doesn't help when looking at the git history.

[–] bbkane 2 days ago

Yup I switched to WezTerm from iTerm2 and being able to version control the settings is one of the biggest benefits (especially because WezTerm allows more complicated Lua scripts)

[–] asdf88990 2 days ago

Why put up with quirks when you have something that works for you? How much faster ghostty is in practical terms?

[–] merb 1 day ago

It really depends what you are doing. But copy and paste is super slow on iterm2, like coffee going slow.

[–] jen20 2 days ago

I used iTerm and iTerm 2 for almost 20 years before switching to Ghostty full time in 2024 with minimal fuss besides the muscle memory of "cmd+space ite" switching to "cmd+space gho" to launch it!

Do you have specific examples of usability issues?

[–] lexoj 2 days ago

My main issues with ghostty: the global shortcut for quick window suddenly stops working and works again only if I focus ghostty. (On a mac)

The other one is quick window goes out of the monitor if i have disconnected and connected the laptop from minitor.

Another: sometimes autocomplete suggestions are shown incorrectly in some weird location (like middle of the screen, not at the cursor), again occasionally.

[–] adrum 2 days ago

I actually fixed one cause of this, which is released in 1.4.0.

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/12714

The only other cause I've encountered is if a secure input (password) field is focused, since macOS won't give apps global keyboard events for obvious reasons. If you focus a normal text input, it should start working again.

I have noticed where macOS doesn't properly release its reference to a Secure Input properly. I've documented how to determine if this is the cause here: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/11883#issuecom...

[–] rekoil 1 day ago

This is such an annoying quirk of macOS, I regularly SSH to some servers I need to get my password to from 1Password, and I am apparently incapable of re-programming myself to copy the password prior to starting the SSH connection, so what happens is I SSH, open 1Password quick access (which dismisses my Ghostty-adrum quick-terminal), copy my password, and then frantically spam my quick-terminal shortcut until I remember it's blocked because macOS has decided its not allowed in the current state.

Would be great if we could opt out a few pre-determined key combinations from this system, but I guess that's never happening.

Thanks so much for maintaining Ghostty tabbed quick-terminal by the way, you're a legend <3

[–] jen20 2 days ago

Aha, this explains why I've never seen this kind of thing: I don't use quick window!

[–] tinco 2 days ago

I'm happy with ghostty now too, but until a couple months ago it didn't have search. Which made me uncertain how people use terminals without built-in search. It really surprised me that it apparently was so low on the must-haves list that it took over a year to have it. I think I search terminals multiple times a day when I'm operating production systems.

[–] pavel_pt 1 day ago

AFAICT, the bug from 1.3.1 where you cannot paste into the search field is still present in 1.4. I guess agents doing all the grepping these days?