On Sun, Sep 28, 2025 at 9:38 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
From: Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
- First and foremost, the *ghostty* terminal emulator. It's a remarkable improvement over the stock KDE or GNOME terminal app that many of us use. Also available for MacOS;
Evan: what did you find attractive?
I'm just reading the readme.md from < https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty> I don't see anything that would make me change from the default on my desktop, Gnome Terminal. (I lean towards using defaults because of the "pick your fights" principle.)
Anytime a new replacement for something comes out, I appreciate and respect a response of "it does nothing new that I need". If it's not broke don't fix it. Everyone has their own evaluation of what constitutes a compelling reason to part with the familiar; that's practically the definition of YMMV. What's compelling to me is a novelty act to others, and that's fine. I would only add that these days there are many more sources of input for the evaluation than a project's README file. At very least I prefer third-party reviews that won't either understate or overstate the project's appeal. With so much sheer volume of content being written and video-recorded, it's not hard to find such reviews for new shiny toys like Ghostty. And given that Ghostty's reason for being is as a purely visual tool, it would make sense to at least watch it in action over someone else's shoulder. I watched a few of these before installing and am now playing with it myself. I consider it a significant upgrade, not all will agree. I find that many of the tiling benefits that made Hyprland appealing, IMO, can be sufficiently duplicated in Ghostty, such that I don't need to change my window manager. One might review such demos and still come to the conclusion that there's no compelling reason to veer from one's desktop defaults. It's one more thing to keep track of, and since ghostty is not yet in mainstream distribution repositories some effort must be expended to obtain it. Indeed, all of the software I mentioned (with the exception of fzf) are designed as drop-in replacements for existing tools, tools which have served users well for decades. All I suggest is that starting and ending at the project's README may not provide optimal premises upon which to base one's conclusions. - Evan