Not sure if this counts as enlightenment, but here goes. IMO, YMMV, etc.

This isn't just about ghostty. It seems to me that there is something of a renaissance (revenge?) of the console terminal -- now highly capable and customizable -- as part of an alternative to modern graphical desktop environments. It manifests in renewed interest in things like ASCII art (ie, fastfetch, htop and their derivatives) and a new generation of Wayland-based apps such as Hyprland (which functionally isn't anything novel) and the Omarchy desktop environment built on top of it (which is). These are complemented by other components such as Nerd Fonts, which include more than 10,000 icons and enable text-based tools to offer visual cues previously only available in GUIs, for a fraction of the resource use. Even the onboard graphics capabilities built into in CPUs have enough juice to power this, not to mention older computers.

Maybe I'm just late to the game, but in the last year I've been discovering a new generation of console tools that are fairly new (to me), spurred on by this drive to the console that I wouldn't yet call mainstream but is well beyond niche. I started exploring it and described my journey in another GTALUG post back in September. That introduced me to tools such as yazi, fd and fzf, and I continue to learn about new ones such as `timg` this week. The fish shell, growing in popularity despite its breakage of traditional scripting syntax, is also a part of this movement.

In this context, ghostty is just one of a wonderfully growing field of terminal emulators, from super lightweight ones such as `foot` to kitchen-sink AI-infused heavyweights such as Wave. Who knew this category would attract so much attention in the mid-2020s? Has Wayland really unlocked *this* much potential? Heck, ghostty even comes with its own terminfo entry to enable its enhanced functions, and I haven't touched terminfo since my Unix days. I picked ghostty for my own use after reading a bunch of reviews comparing it favourably to similar ones such as Kitty and Alacritty.

HTH.