The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see. And honestly, LLMs make this all way less painful... even though they're not trained on it, agents are able to run builds, reference docs, and work their way through the upgrade with huge success.
I thought that finding contributors would be an issue, but it hasn't at all. There's a lot of people out there eager to use Zig, the language isn't hard to learn (as long as you're already familiar with systems concepts), etc. It has been good.
I'll think about more to say if I write about this more but overall, I'm very happy with the language, the community, and the leadership. All good.
I'm surprised to hear LLMs have been helpful. What little I tried to use them for with Zig, all the information was way too out of date. But I was mainly just doing research, not running an agent at the time, so that's probably why.
I've been slow on the agent pickup. The ethical issues really bother me (LLMs in general), though it's clear I'm not gonna have a choice in this industry so I've been caving recently. The persistent narrative that agents can build entire complex software systems is also irritating, because that clearly doesn't seem to align with reality.
I was thinking that downloading the full official documentation, separated by sections inside the repository someone is working on with Zig, could be useful, but maybe there are more optimal ways to approach this.
Thanks.
What has it been like witnessing terminal emulators make such a huge comeback with the advent of Claude Code et. all? I remember comments here in the early days of Ghostty along the lines of "Why is he working on a terminal emulator? We need people working on future problems, not the past!" Pretty funny considering I regularly hear people say they are in the terminal more than the browser now. Crazy times!
If you told me 3 years ago that terminal usage would _increase_ I would've laughed. Beyond that, I'm now having regular conversations with the frontier agentic coding companies (since they're far and away the largest terminal users at the moment) and if you had told me 2 years ago that that would be happening because of a terminal, I would've laughed even harder.
So, it's amazing. But overall, its amusing.
What’s old is new again is apparently just as true in tech as it is in fashion.
That's probably why it is so hyped up as it is right now.
Essentially, I have a few features that have a TUI-first UI, and the obvious next step is to expose some of that to a browser.
It was so easy to get the terminal functionality going with `libghostty`. Most time was spent building the functionality around it.
Thanks for making it.
If so that actually sounds really cool. I'd like a dedicated lazygit app in my tray at all times.
It also got me wondering how things would be different if you haven't crossed paths with the guy who unplugged your mouse :) It's fascinating how life is full of these small yet defining moments. We don't always appreciate them right away, but beautiful to look back.
Thanks for Ghostty! It has been my daily terminal driver for the past year.
It’s common for me to have 15-25 different terminal windows open for using Claude code. I shifted to Ghostty because I was looking for more features.
Unfortunately, none of the features I wanted are available anywhere (though I’ve come to appreciate Ghostty anyway). Here’s what I had wanted:
1. Basic text editing features (ie click to place cursor in the text input field; highlight to delete)
2. Change colors or fonts mid session (to make it easier to find particular windows)
3. Window management and search (eg, a way to find my windows when I lose them and to otherwise control them)
Apparently, it is really hard to develop features like these for terminal emulators. I’d love to understand why…
As for editing text, ghostty+tmux most definitely supports editing text with the mouse (even an in terminal right click menu!) although sounds like your intended use of select to delete isn’t common so you’ll need to do some customizations.
I'm sure you feel the same watching Ghostty become what it has. Big thank you.
Tabs (and panes? I haven't tried yet) should work fine for regular terminal windows though.
Also, Zellij is nice.
This is addressed in paragraph 5 of the post they replied to.
I’ve been trying to figure out how I could actually help him distribute it and I keep coming back to the best option being to wrap his programs terminal output into a host process that can emulate and render it. It seems that the lib Ghostty might be perfect for the former, but not quite yet on the latter?
I've been waiting for the vim feature to hit stable, and have just been checking to see if there's a new release every so often, but I couldn't find a discussion or anything to see when it was planned.
I was a long-time Kitty user, but switching to Ghostty has been a big upgrade for my workflow. Hard to go back now. Thank you
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1loiw2z/comment/n0...
Out of curiosity, does ghostty do the Quake terminal thing - I use yakuake for this, but it feels a bit long in the tooth.
This works on MacOS, and on Linux sometimes:
> On Linux, the quick terminal is only supported on Wayland and not X11, and only on Wayland compositors that support the wlr-layer-shell-v1 protocol. In practice, this means that only GNOME users would not be able to use this feature.
> Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more
Big fan. Can I get a ride on your jet?
Nice! Looks like I should have rushed the interview. :D