It's a desktop/GUI application. It's definitely not a standard for those, no. I share the OPs frustation that I don't even know what I can configure and have to search web to be able to change something. And while the documentation is nice, it's not exactly great for this.

Also, having an explorable and searchable UI doesn't mean it's not saved in the same shareable and readable file.

no, especially for an app that boasts to be "native"

The ultimate end format for the config stored on disc is completely irrelevant to how the config is created. Simple doesn’t mean easy to experiment with, simple to understand, fast to write and so on.

No one is confused as to how the ghostty config works. Key value pairs. Sure. A window full of GUI controls and system color pickers can create that config file, or I can manually by hand. I’d prefer the former.

That could have been acceptable. The problem is it's empty; it should instead contain the default configuration.

You can see the default configuration by running `ghostty +show-config --default`

In that case it should be easy to prefill the config file if it doesn't already exist.