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Comment by leetrout | Hacker News Reader

I'm very excited to have this because it's the first bit of high quality open source software to hit the streets in a while.

I like where we're headed with tools like this and Ladybird[0] for hope of a subscriptionless future.

Thank you, Mitchell!

[0] https://ladybird.org/

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> I like where we're headed with tools like this and Ladybird[0] for hope of a subscriptionless future.

That's a weird statement. I've been running a free, open-source and subscription-less browser (firefox) and terminal emulator (many) for close to 20 years.

Actually I like what ladybird is doing in the browser space, given firefox is quite dependent on google cash. But this is just yet another terminal emulator in a sea of them. The only two distinguishing features I can see are hype and native UI (which mac users care about for some reason -- my native UI is a borderless rectangle in tiling WM).

native UI is so much more than how a border of a window looks like.

What is native UI in this context? My terminal emulator is also always basically a full-screen black textarea with white letters. No window borders, no tabs, no buttons, no menus, nothing else. Is there anything native UI would give me in this case (and what is a native UI, I can't find it defined anywhere)?

This gets brought up a lot, so I wrote about it here https://gpanders.com/blog/ghostty-is-native-so-what/

> This also means that native features like pressing Shift+⌘+\ open the tab overview, just as in other applications.

Ah, so this is a macos thing and not just Safari. Can anyone help me select a tab using a keyboard? I use the shortcut, type in the search box and...have to use the mouse :(

I don’t recall where, and don’t have my laptop handy, but there is a macOS system option to enable tabbing through all controls (not just inputs), that _should_ do it

> The big picture of "native" is that Ghostty is designed to look, feel, and behave like you expect an application to behave in your desktop environment.

> On macOS, the GUI is written in Swift and uses AppKit and SwiftUI.

(https://ghostty.org/docs/about#native)

I'm using Linux with Xfce, but it seems to be locked into a Gnome-like look and feel, with header bars and CSDs that can't be disabled in favor of standard title bars and menus, so it's actually very inconsistent with the rest of my desktop environment.

I was looking into this recently. If you add this to the config, it'll blend in better with XFCE.

  window-theme = system
  gtk-titlebar = false
  gtk-wide-tabs = false
  gtk-adwaita = false

Dunno if anyone will see this comment, but if they do, here is the solution :D

These settings worked, thanks!

After testing Ghostty out for a while, though, I've realized that input lag is higher than xfce4-terminal, font rendering is blurrier with equivalent settings, the UI is still less consistent with my desktop, and it has three to four times the memory footprint on top of all that. Since xfce4-terminal is already using native GTK, so there's nothing gained on that front.

Disabling the UI cruft just turns it into a less performant version of Xterm, so unfortunately, this is going to be an uninstall for me.

Thanks, ghostty looked really off in KDE by default.

Your rebuttal is not mutually exclusive to the parent comment. They say it’s the first _new_ such thing in a while, not that there aren’t any in existence.

It does where it says they give hope for a wunsciptionless future. We've always had subscriptionless, and the software that was subscriptionless is still around.

Can't edit my post anymore so replying to myself with an addendum:

I wrote the comment in a rush last night and I think it sounds like I'm dumping on ghostty. That is not my intention, it looks very well made and a true passion project which I have lot of respect for.

I just took issue with GP adding yet more hype to this.

>first bit of high quality open source software

That feels like an exaggregation. L High quality open source software is uploaded daily to GitHub.

What was the last one? Ghidra?

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