Ghostty 1.4 Delivers Performance Gains, Drops Support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Mitchell Hashimoto's Ghostty terminal emulator, which harnesses GPU acceleration while preserving native appearance across platforms, has reached version 1.4. The application relies on GTK for Linux and Swift for macOS. According to the project, millions of users run Ghostty daily, and its libghostty-vt library—a C-based virtual terminal implementation—has been integrated into competing terminal emulators.

The v1.4 release represents a substantial update, drawing contributions from over 170 developers and incorporating more than 2,800 commits. Linux users will see the most significant changes, though other platforms also receive updates.

What's new?

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS can no longer run Ghostty's native builds because version 1.4 mandates GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7; the application exits at startup if these libraries are unavailable. The development team suggests that users on affected systems can install an earlier build instead.

The GTK implementation now renders text crisply at fractional scaling levels like 125% or 150%, resolving blurriness that emerged from upstream library changes. A redesigned triple-buffered renderer aims to eliminate screen tearing.

Split window drag-and-drop functionality, previously available on macOS since version 1.3, now works across the application, allowing splits to be repositioned to other splits, tabs, or windows while preserving their running processes and working directories.

Wayland global keybinds now leverage the vicinae-hotkey-v1 protocol on compositors such as Hyprland 0.56 and newer, with fallback to the desktop portal elsewhere. This change should enhance hotkey consistency across different Wayland environments. Background blur support has been added for Niri, and a new +toggle-quick-terminal command assists window managers unable to register global shortcuts.

Several GTK keyboard shortcuts have been redesigned:

• Ctrl+Shift+PageUp and Ctrl+Shift+PageDown move the current tab left or right
• Ctrl+Shift+Arrow-Up and Ctrl+Shift+Arrow-Down navigate between previous and next prompts, supplementing the jump_to_prompt action

The copy-on-select clipboard behavior has changed; users relying on the previous approach should switch to both. When idle, off-screen scrollback now compresses automatically, yielding estimated memory savings between 70% and 90%. This optimization has enabled raising the default scrollback limit to 50MB from 10MB.

Some additional changes

Ghostty now fully implements the Kitty graphics protocol; the developers claim no other terminal besides Kitty itself has achieved this. A new ghostty +ssh command replaces ssh and deploys Ghostty's terminfo on the remote system before establishing a connection.

Ten security vulnerabilities were patched, four affecting macOS exclusively. The remaining fixes address a paste protection vulnerability and a specially crafted directory name that could trigger zsh integration to emit escape sequences, potentially overwriting clipboard contents without user awareness.

macOS users gain support for macOS 27, while those on older hardware retain macOS 13 compatibility until the project discontinues it in a later release.

On Windows, the project has removed GUI support from its development roadmap, directing downstream developers to libghostty and libghostty-vt, both of which are already compiled for Windows.

Get Ghostty 1.4

Official binaries from the Ghostty project are available only for macOS. Linux distributions handle their own packaging; Arch Linux, NixOS, Alpine Linux, Gentoo, openSUSE, and Ubuntu 26.04 currently offer it. Community-maintained DEB, AppImage, and Snap packages are available, though building from source is encouraged.

To build Ghostty from the source tarball, use zig build. The build guide contains the necessary instructions.