TIL: Ghostty the new terminal emulator on the block

#cli #todayilearned #ghostty

I have recently picked up Ghostty the new terminal emulator on the block. It was all over my feeds so I decided to give it a spin.

Currently I am using Warp and iTerm2 for my terminal needs, I recently adopted Warp as my main terminal emulator and it is incrediby impressive. I have been using iTerm2 for years and it is still my go to terminal emulator for a few things, like SSH and remote work, since I have those profiles setup and ready to go - the primary reason is the themes since I have different themes for different profiles, so it makes it easy to navigate between windows.

Anyway I installed Ghossty and it a very nice terminal emulator, it is incredibly fast and I like it. Here I will hightlight two of the things I noticed when I started using it, both a are lifted from my TIL collection.

Unsuiteable Terminal

The first wall I hit was when attempting to SSH into a remote server, I got the following error message:

missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-ghostty

I did some googling and found a blog post, which suggested 3 different workarounds.

One was updating term_info on the remote host, this is somewhat cumbersome and not something I wanted to maintain going forward with updates on the remote host.

Second was by the blog post author and involved changing the TERM environment variable to something more recognisable than: xterm-ghostty.

[[ "$TERM_PROGRAM" == "ghostty" ]]; then
    export TERM=xterm-256color

The last one, which I chose to go with was changing my SSH configuration on my local machine, so the environment variable was set as part of the SSH configuration:

SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color

The last part works like a charm as sort of does the same as the second one.

This was a minot bump in the road and not a showstopper, since the next part just won me over.

Visor Mode

Ghostty has a nifty feature of a terminal window you can access easily even if Ghostty is not the active application, I believe this is called a visor - and it seems to originate from the Quake terminal, where you have this overlay terminal you can access with a key combination at all times.