I assume the quote is referring to libghostty. In which case a lot of different tools like vs code, Emacs, Gvim, Intellij and other IDEs, even web consoles on stuff like Azure essentially use and reimplement the same core, the idea behind libghostty is to replace those with a common component where long term development can better support the needs of all terminals.

In terms of ghostty itself its just a highly competent use of libghostty, Mitchell’s message above about it being a tech demo is tongue and cheek, but its not far off from the truth. It is just a really solid no bells and whistles, bar excellent execution, terminal emulator that uses libghostty.

Terminal state machine parsing is a very tricky thing, especially when you have people defining arbitrary protocols to interact with it. So having one implementation simplifies the development a lot. Of course this buys you into their ecosystem and whatever ghostty specifically supports etc.

A lot of other terminal emulators can expose similar reusable things (alacritty comes to mind) but libghostty is the most well supported one

It being super responsive is the reason I switched to it. MacOS terminal had issues keeping up with Claude Code. It would frequently be super slow rendering the text output or sometimes just stop altogether.

When looking at options I looked at speed and simplicity. Ghostty fit the bill but I did evaluate iterm as well. Excellent terminal but too many features for what I was looking for. I live in the terminal but am not a Terminal App power user if that makes sense.

So, it really comes down to what you want and what your workflow looks like. Ghostty has been flawless for me the past 9months. It gets out of the way and just works really well.