A new major version of Ghostthe open source terminal emulator, is released.
Ghostty 1.4.0 brings a diverse set of changes after seven months of development. There are welcome performance optimizations on Linux and macOS, a more capable SSH implementation, and an easier way to rearrange tab splits – by dragging them!
This update to the Zig-based app offers full support for the Kitty graphics protocol (including animation and relative placements) – the first terminal besides Kitty to do so. If you use TUI tools or scripts to render images in the terminal, this is a major feat.
The developers say that performance is significantly improved with this update. Notably, Ghost Version 1.4.0 now compresses off-screen scrolling when the terminal is idle. This reduces the amount of physical RAM used by text-heavy histories by up to 90%.
The content is unzipped if you scroll back or use the text search feature added in the Ghostty 1.3.0 update earlier this year.
Under Linux, The ghosts The GTK app renders text sharply at fractional display scales such as 125% and 150%, which should resolve the oft-mentioned issues with blurry text.
The update also replaces GtkGLArea with an EGL rendering pipeline that runs on a separate thread and passes images to GTK using DMA-BUF. This requires an EGL system library; If a GPU cannot export DMA-BUFs, a slower CPU-based copy is used.
And the terminal divisions in the GTK version can be rearranged by drag and drop. When a tab has two or more splits, each split has a drag handle that can be grabbed and the split can be dragged and dropped onto another split.
Other changes include:
Linux changes to note:
- Desktop notifications are suppressed if the device is targeted or closed
- Updated the Noto emoji font so that the most recent ZWJ sequences are displayed as a single glyph
- Dolphin’s “Open Ghostty Here” opens a new window in the running instance
- Split resizing no longer flickers and can no longer be made too small
- Mouse cursor maintains its text shape when selecting text
- The command palette uses terminal colors if
window-theme = ghostty - URLs now open via the XDG desktop portal
And configuration options on GTK versions include gtk-horizontal-tab-scrollwhich can be set to false to disable two-finger scrolling when switching tabs, and gtk-tabs-invertedto move the close button to the start of each tab.
Install Ghostty 1.4.0
Ubuntu 26.10 includes Ghost in the deposits, putting it a apt install ghostty far. But this won’t give you the most recent version. For the changes mentioned above, you will need to use an alternative method.
There are many.
You can install Ghost on Ubuntu using an unofficial, community-run Ghostty DEB (and which has its own Ghostty PPA for easy updates). There is also a Ghostty AppImage and an unofficial Snap.
On macOS, Ghost provides official binaries (recommended; supports in-app updating), and it is also available through Homebrew and other CLI package managers.
Ghostty drops support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
As Ghost 1.4.0 requires GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7, according to the terminal’s GTK/Adwaita version policy, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS no longer meets the requirements. This means that a DEB version of Ghostty (e.g. from the PPA above) can no longer be installed.
By the way, the underlying libghostty The Terminal Emulation Library will power terminals in future versions of JetBrains IDEs. Linux Mint’s new terminal app, Speeddoes not use it, but its design would have been inspired by Ghost.
Gn tech
