Ghostty 1.3 in 2026: was the terminal hype warranted?

Ghostty 1.3.1 is a good terminal. Not a revolution — a well-executed, fast, text-first terminal that has shipped consistently since its December 2024 launch. If you run macOS or a recent Ubuntu and want something that doesn’t get in your way, get it. If you need Windows, Sixel graphics, or persistent multiplexer sessions without tmux, don’t.

Who Ghostty is for

Developers on macOS or Linux who want a fast, native-feeling terminal without Warp’s cloud dependencies or iTerm2’s feature sprawl. If you’re on Windows, stop here — Ghostty has no Windows support and none is planned.

What we tested

Ghostty: 1.3.1 (March 13, 2026)
Test machine: M4 MacBook Pro
Comparison baseline: Alacritty (latest), iTerm2 3.5.x, Warp 2.x — all as of May 2026

Benchmark methodology: cold startup averaged over 10 runs, idle RSS from Activity Monitor, scroll latency from the devtoolreviews.com benchmark suite. Primary sources are linked in the references section.

Performance

The numbers that circulated in 2024 reviews are still roughly correct — with one important caveat.

	Ghostty 1.3.1	Alacritty	iTerm2	Warp
Cold startup	95ms	65ms	340ms	890ms
Idle RAM	28MB	14MB	185MB	340MB
Scroll latency (10k lines)	4–6ms	3ms	8–12ms	—

Startup and RAM figures: M4 MacBook Pro. Scroll latency: devtoolreviews.com benchmark suite (M4 Mac mini). Warp scroll latency excluded — its renderer architecture makes direct comparison misleading.

The caveat: these are synthetic benchmarks. When Ghostty’s own developers engaged with the community in a GitHub discussion on performance honesty, they were direct — Ghostty is not the fastest terminal on stress tests, and they’re not optimising for that. In real workloads — Helix with a 4,000-line file open, htop scrolling at full rate — there’s no perceptible difference between Ghostty and Kitty.

What matters: Ghostty is not Warp. At 28MB idle versus Warp’s 340MB, you give up nothing by switching on a memory-constrained machine. The 30ms startup gap over Alacritty is real and irrelevant to anyone who actually types in the terminal.

Configuration

Ghostty uses a custom key = value format — not TOML, not JSON, not YAML. The config lives at ~/.config/ghostty/config.ghostty.

font-size = 13
font-family = JetBrains Mono
theme = Catppuccin Mocha
window-padding-x = 10
macos-option-as-alt = true

No GUI settings panel. No preferences window. You edit a file, save it, Ghostty reloads live. This is a deliberate design choice, and it’s a real trade-off: fast to iterate for anyone who knows what they want, opaque for anyone discovering the tool cold.

What it does well: the config surface is small relative to what it unlocks. Key binding remaps, theming, font configuration, platform-specific tweaks — all in one text file you can commit to dotfiles. The documentation covers every key.

What it doesn’t do: there’s no discovery mechanism. If you don’t know that macos-option-as-alt = true exists, you won’t stumble onto it by poking a preferences pane. That’s the honest cost of text-first configuration.

Multiplexer story

Ghostty ships native tabs and splits. They work. The keyboard shortcuts are sensible. You can run a multi-pane workflow without touching tmux.

There is no session persistence. Quit Ghostty, reopen it, and your panes are gone.

Most Ghostty users still run tmux inside for session management. This wasn’t a regression in 2026 — it was always this way. What 17 months of production use has clarified is the expectation: Ghostty is a terminal frame, not a session manager. If you want zellij or tmux, you run it inside. If you came from iTerm2 expecting “Restore Windows on Launch,” you’ll need to wire up a tmux autostart in your shell rc file.

Shell integration

Shell integration is Ghostty’s clearest functional advantage over bare-bones terminals like Alacritty.

It auto-injects for bash, fish, zsh, nushell, and elvish. You opt out if you prefer. What you get:

Semantic zones: Ghostty distinguishes prompt text, command text, and output. You can select only the output of the last command without drag-to-highlight gymnastics.
Click-to-move cursor (added in 1.3.0): click inside a command you’re editing to reposition the cursor. Saves the arrow-key loop.
Kitty Graphics Protocol: render images inline. Useful if your tooling supports it — icat, Yazi, some charting libraries.
OSC 8 hyperlinks: URLs in terminal output render as clickable links.

What it doesn’t support: Sixel graphics. This is intentional. In the Ghostty Sixel discussion, Mitchell Hashimoto explained the decision: the edge cases are numerous and unspecified, libsixel is poorly written and poorly suited for drop-in adoption, the performance impact is unclear but unlikely to be zero, and he prefers the Kitty Graphics Protocol for new work. If you depend on Sixel for specific tooling, that’s a hard blocker. For most people, KGP covers the real use cases.

Cross-platform

macOS is the primary target and the polish shows. Ghostty uses Metal for rendering, respects ProMotion (120Hz on M-series displays), and integrates with native macOS conventions — keyboard shortcuts behave the way the system expects.

Linux support is real and improving. Ghostty 1.3.1 ships as a GTK4 app with Wayland support. The bigger news: as of Ubuntu 26.04, Ghostty is available via apt:

sudo apt install ghostty

That’s a genuine milestone. Users who previously built from source or added a PPA now have a first-class package. The Ubuntu integration landed in April 2026.

No Windows. There is no Windows version and no announced plans for one. If your workflow spans Windows and macOS, Ghostty is not your cross-platform terminal. WezTerm is the realistic alternative.

The GitHub departure

On April 28, 2026, Mitchell Hashimoto announced that Ghostty is moving off GitHub. The reason: chronic GitHub Actions outages were disrupting CI and the team lost confidence in Actions as a reliable pipeline. A read-only mirror stays on GitHub; the canonical repository moves to a host TBD.

This is worth knowing rather than worrying about. The code is MIT-licensed, the community is active, and the read-only GitHub mirror preserves existing issue links. The practical impact for users is zero. For contributors: watch ghostty.org for the new repository URL.

Verdict

Use Ghostty if you’re on macOS or Ubuntu 26.04+, you want a terminal that’s fast without being bare-metal minimal, and you’re comfortable managing sessions via tmux. Shell integration alone makes it worth choosing over Alacritty for most people.

Stick with Kitty if you need Sixel graphics, want an older and more battle-tested cross-platform config story, or are already running Kitty without complaints. The terminals are close enough that inertia is a legitimate reason to stay.

Look elsewhere if you’re on Windows, need GUI-discoverable settings, or require persistent terminal sessions without a multiplexer.

If you’re also weighing Warp against iTerm2, our Warp vs iTerm2 comparison covers both in detail.

Ghostty is not a hype object anymore. It’s a stable, maintained terminal with a clear point of view. That’s worth more than the launch-day coverage suggested.

Caveats

Performance figures are from M4 Mac only — benchmarks on Intel or ARM Linux may differ. We did not measure under Windows Subsystem for Linux. Scroll latency methodology comes from devtoolreviews.com; we didn’t run an independent scroll benchmark.

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