Ghostty

Ghostty is an open-source terminal emulator by Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp), written from scratch in Zig and open-sourced under MIT at its public launch in December 2024 after two years of closed development. Its pitch is that terminals have always forced a choice between speed, features, and native UI — Ghostty refuses the tradeoff. Rendering is GPU-accelerated (Metal on macOS, OpenGL on Linux), the interface uses platform-native toolkits (AppKit on macOS, GTK4 on Linux) instead of Electron or a custom widget layer, and it works out of the box with sensible defaults while offering hundreds of configuration options, hundreds of built-in color themes, and custom keybindings.

It supports modern terminal protocols including Kitty graphics and keyboard protocols, synchronized rendering, and light/dark mode notifications, with native tabs and splits, sub-100ms startup, font ligatures, and a simple key-value config file with hot reload. libghostty exposes the core as an embeddable C-compatible library. It runs on macOS and Linux; Windows is planned but not yet supported. Benchmarks comparing it to Alacritty and Kitty are community-reported rather than independently published, so treat the speed crown as widely-reported rather than verified. Within about fifteen months of launch it passed 45,000 stars — it now sits above 60,000.

Download the macOS DMG from ghostty.org, install via Homebrew (brew install --cask ghostty), or use your Linux distro's package manager / release binary. No configuration is needed to start; optional config lives in ~/.config/ghostty/config as simple key=value lines that hot-reload. A Nerd Font layer ships bundled (JetBrains Mono), so no font installation is required.