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Comment by dimator | Hacker News Reader

i tried ghostty, rio, wezterm, they all stuck for about a month or so... then the subtle usability issues become too much, and i wonder why i switched from iterm2 to begin with. there's something to be said for years of polish, and feature work that is well-baked.

iterm2 is fast, reliable, and second nature. i don't have to edit settings every day.

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btw I used iterm2 for years as well and sometimes tried others.

I now use ghostty it’s faster definitely. Yes it has some quirks which is hard to overcome as a iterm2 user. But I could live with it. I think ghostty is basically also the only alternative to iterm2

While I'm not a hard core terminal emulator expert or tweaker, it was a bit of a learning curve to get into Ghostty after iTerm2. I hope this latest release makes it easier to edit the splits, haven't tested yet.

But the biggest thing that made me stay on Ghostty was that there's a freaking config file. With iTerm you had to export the profile and keybindings, and then import them on a new system which was clumsy, and easy to forget. Now ghostty.config is just one of my dotfiles, with a clear understandable git history, I love it.

There's ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist and it's always been there

OK that's the file I've been backing up and importing I believe. But it's in a binary format. There's `plutil -p ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist` but that doesn't help when looking at the git history.

plutil -convert xml1 binary.plist -o xml.plist

now its in plain text

or just commit the defaults, plutil, or PlistBuddy commands you'd need to recreate the same plist.

Yup I switched to WezTerm from iTerm2 and being able to version control the settings is one of the biggest benefits (especially because WezTerm allows more complicated Lua scripts)

Exactly. Versioning terminal config makes experimentation safer, and Lua opens up useful automation. I’ve been using GitHub to track changes and review config tweaks, which keeps everything organized across machines.

Why put up with quirks when you have something that works for you? How much faster ghostty is in practical terms?

It really depends what you are doing. But copy and paste is super slow on iterm2, like coffee going slow.

I used iTerm and iTerm 2 for almost 20 years before switching to Ghostty full time in 2024 with minimal fuss besides the muscle memory of "cmd+space ite" switching to "cmd+space gho" to launch it!

Do you have specific examples of usability issues?

My main issues with ghostty: the global shortcut for quick window suddenly stops working and works again only if I focus ghostty. (On a mac)

The other one is quick window goes out of the monitor if i have disconnected and connected the laptop from minitor.

Another: sometimes autocomplete suggestions are shown incorrectly in some weird location (like middle of the screen, not at the cursor), again occasionally.

I actually fixed one cause of this, which is released in 1.4.0.

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/12714

The only other cause I've encountered is if a secure input (password) field is focused, since macOS won't give apps global keyboard events for obvious reasons. If you focus a normal text input, it should start working again.

I have noticed where macOS doesn't properly release its reference to a Secure Input properly. I've documented how to determine if this is the cause here: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/11883#issuecom...

This is such an annoying quirk of macOS, I regularly SSH to some servers I need to get my password to from 1Password, and I am apparently incapable of re-programming myself to copy the password prior to starting the SSH connection, so what happens is I SSH, open 1Password quick access (which dismisses my Ghostty-adrum quick-terminal), copy my password, and then frantically spam my quick-terminal shortcut until I remember it's blocked because macOS has decided its not allowed in the current state.

Would be great if we could opt out a few pre-determined key combinations from this system, but I guess that's never happening.

Thanks so much for maintaining Ghostty tabbed quick-terminal by the way, you're a legend <3

Aha, this explains why I've never seen this kind of thing: I don't use quick window!

I'm happy with ghostty now too, but until a couple months ago it didn't have search. Which made me uncertain how people use terminals without built-in search. It really surprised me that it apparently was so low on the must-haves list that it took over a year to have it. I think I search terminals multiple times a day when I'm operating production systems.

AFAICT, the bug from 1.3.1 where you cannot paste into the search field is still present in 1.4. I guess agents doing all the grepping these days?

hey man creator of rio here, have you tried Canario (https://rioterm.com/canario) ? best

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