If you're a terminal emulator enthusiast then I already know you're very happy. We've been literally spoiled for choice as the last few years have seen a sort of terminal emulator comeback.

There are tons of new and cool terminal emulators ready to make the most of the capable hardware of modern computers. Two excellent examples that pop into mind are Alacritty and Countour, both free and open-source apps, both fast, extensible, and feature-packed, and both featuring GPU acceleration.

Ghostty is the latest "new-age" terminal emulator to appear from the shadows, and thankfully, it's not a spooky apparition (see what I did there?), in fact, quite the contrary.

First things first: the name Ghostty is not a typo. Linux veterans will probably know all there is to know about the "tty" command, so I'm not going to bother explaining.

Secondly, Ghossty is the passion project of Mitchell Hashimoto (the co-founder of HashiCorp). If this name seems familiar, then it's because you might associate it with some very cool developer tools such as Vagrant, Packer, Consul, Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Waypoint, and many more.

Thirdly, and most importantly, what's Ghostty all about? In short, it's about feeling native, it's about being fast, and feature-packed. Let's unpack these three concepts.

On the "native-feeling" front, it's important to note that Ghostty is an app designed for both macOS and Linux. On macOS, the GUI is written in Swift (and uses AppKit and SwiftUI), while on Linux, the GUI is written in Zig and uses GTK4 (or, optionally, Adwaita).

The whole architecture is based on libghostty (which provides the whole core terminal emulation, font handling, and rendering capabilities), but this is a much more complex discussion (and you can read more about it on the app's About section, also the place where you can check out all the installation and configuration details).

One of the most important aspects of all GPU-accelerated terminal emulators is, of course, speed. On basic "noob" usage (because I'm not a hardcore terminal emulator user), Ghostty feels very responsive and fast. I haven't had the opportunity to test its performance on massive tasks. Just know this, it's as fast as most of the top-tier terminal emulators out there, and it employs OpenGL on Linux and Metal on macOS for fast rendering jobs.

Just like Ghostty doesn't try to be the fastest terminal emulator out there, it also doesn't try to be the most feature-packed app of this sort out there.

At the end of the day, Ghostty has a lot of interesting features, but the highlights include the fact that it's free, open-source, and cross-platform (with native UI components for each platform), the fact that it features GPU-accelerated rendering, and support for GUI themes.

The fact that it also supports windows, tabs, and window splits is also something worth mentioning, and so is the support for (font) ligatures, grapheme clustering (multi-codepoint emoji such as flags, skins, tones, etc.).

Last but not least, Ghostty boasts support for the Kitty graphics protocol,  as Xterm compatibility, protocol origin compatibility, as well as defacto standard compatibility, as well as integration with popular shells such as Bash, Zsh, FIsh, Elvish, and so forth.

Quite clearly, Ghostty has a lot going for it. As a beginner/average terminal emulator user, I can say that it manages to hit home in all three respects: it feels native, it is fast, and the features are definitely there.

I also have to say that Ghostty feels a cut above most other new terminal emulators I've tried lately, and it's no wonder that this app has only just existed beta (after two years). It's also quite apparent that someone really loves what they're doing, hence, Ghostty really feels like a labor of love.

If all things go as planned, who knows, this might very well be one of the top three open-source and cross-platform terminal emulators out there for both Linux and macOS (and Windows, in the future).