Similar to this, but I actually needed to compile it. Still only took 5 minutes to be up and running even though I've never gone near that toolchain before.
Re:Release Notes for Ghostty 1.1.0
by throwaway678339 on Friday January 31, 2025 @09:57AM
(#42888289)
And yet somehow ghostty still doesn't support cmd-f text search. Such a basic and important feature, and I don't get why they can't add it.
Of course they can. They just haven’t, yet, due to different priorities. Also, I barely use search in my terminals, and I believe there’s more of us for who lack of this feature is not a deal breaker.
I know that kitty has a one line install and has done for ages, and the defaults are fine? One thing I really liked about the default config was that it lists every option with an explanation.
Since you insist, I actually downloaded kitty again and tried it. And I confirmed that I disagree with "it's not as good as kitty".
Within minutes I ran into a problem: tried to select a theme using 'kitten themes', could navigate themes but enter did not work, nor was I able to Ctrl-C. I had to kill the app from a different terminal (ahem).
That's what I remember from trying other terminals: they usually try to do too much, and there are plenty of rough edges, which results in me having to spend too much time fussing around. Ghostty gets this right: things work well, the defaults are good, and things that you want to change are easy to change.
I can answer that from a very pragmatic point of view. I was able to download ghostty and get it to run the way I expected in about 5 minutes. Everything was smooth, intuitive, and the defaults were very good.
I tried many other terminal apps in the past and was always unimpressed, so I kept using Terminal.app. Ghostty is the first terminal emulator in years that worked better than Terminal.app.