Ghostty

I did not think I cared about terminal startup time. I had made my peace with the little beachball, the half-second where iTerm remembered who it was before letting me type. You stop noticing a tax you have paid every day for a decade.

Then I opened Ghostty and the prompt was already there. Not fast — instant, in the way a light switch is instant. And the thing about removing a latency you had learned to ignore is that you cannot un-notice its absence. Every other terminal now feels like it is thinking about whether to admit you.

What it actually gets right

The pitch is speed, and the speed is real — GPU-accelerated rendering, a native core, none of the Electron ballast. But speed is table stakes; plenty of fast things are miserable. What earns Ghostty its place on the panel is that it is fast and it disappears. No config pilgrimage to make it usable. Sane defaults, real ligatures, native tabs that behave like the OS’s tabs because they are.

A tool crosses from “impressive” to “trusted” the moment you stop thinking about it. Ghostty made that crossing in about a week.

There is a deeper thing here about defaults as a moral position. Most terminals hand you a blank room and a thousand knobs and call it freedom. Ghostty made opinions, shipped them, and let the knobs exist for people who disagree. That is harder and rarer and I trust software that does it.

Where the prior could still move

It is young. The plugin story is thin, and I have hit exactly one rendering quirk with a very cursed Unicode-heavy TUI. Neither is disqualifying; both are the kind of thing a p = 0.97 is honest about. The 0.03 is not doubt about the tool — it is humility about how much I have actually stress-tested it.

If it keeps this up, the only reason it ever leaves the panel is that something even quieter takes its seat. I am not holding my breath.