A new version of Ghostty emerged this week and in this post I run-through the key changes.

For those unfamiliar with it, Ghostty is an open-source terminal emulator written in Zig. It offers a “fast, feature-rich, and native” experience — doesn’t claim to be faster, more featured, or go deeper than other native terminals, just offer a competitive combo of the three.

Given it does pretty much everything other terminal emulators do, fans faithful to more established terminal emulators won’t find Ghostty‘s presence spooks ’em into switching. It’s a passion project there to be used (or not) depending on need, taste, or wont.

Its first release late last year made a frighteningly good impression on me, leaving me keen to see how the app’s development continues going forward.

This article isn’t a recap of Ghostty’s core features and USPs, though. It’s a look at what’s new in the latest release, Ghostty 1.1.0.

What’s new in Ghostty 1.1.0?

Ghostty 1.1.0 delivers a month of development effort made-up from 500+ commits from 80+ contributors. No big new features were conjured up during the past 4 weeks but fixes, feature refinements and other finesse do feature

Notably, Ghostty 1.1.0 adds support for server side decorations (SSD) on Linux.

Server side decorations are new in Ghostty 1.1.0

I’m accustomed to hearing and referring to apps that add support for client-side decorations (CSD) so it’s easy to forget to not everyone (or their desktop environment of choice) uses them.

Ghostty 1.1.0 redresses the balance. It defaults to using SSD window frames where supported and preferred by the underlying compositor on Wayland desktops (update: and now X11 too).

As a result, Ghostty looks significantly more in keeping with Linux desktops which aren’t GNOME Shell, such as KDE Plasma.

It’s possible to force CSD, SSD or even make Ghostty use no window decorations at all by setting the value for window-decoration config to auto, server, client or none respectively.

Native-ifcation doesn’t end there.

A traditional app menu bar is also in the works as part of a wider effort to “improve the native look and feel across different desktop environments in Linux to the best of our ability and protocol availability.”

Other changes

Elsewhere, Ghostty intros a new performable: keybinding prefix to control if a configured keyboard shortcut “should only consume the input if the action is performed”, as per this given example:

keybind = performable:ctrl+c=copy_to_clipboard

In this setup, Ghostty only “consumes” — responds to the keyboard shortcut — if there’s selected text to be copied. If not, the shortcut is passed on to the shell (which the app devs note usually triggers an interrupt signal).

Other general config changes: new split-divider-color to specify a divider colour for splits; binary, octal, and hexadecimal support in palette; and renamed goto_split keybinding parameters so top is now up, and bottom is down.

Window controls set to hide when maximised and custom divider colour

Alpha blending buffs improve the edges of text and images (using Kitty Graphics Protocol) shown in the terminal by performing alpha blending in the P3 colour space (rather than sRGB as before). This is only available on macOS atm but it is coming to Linux soon.

Ghostty 1.1.0 improves Input Method Editor (IME) support on macOS and Linux, with CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), dead keys, emoji, and Unicode hex input among input now said to be more reliable and consistent.

And some other general changes:

  • IPv6 URLs now automatically turn into hyperlinks
  • Filepaths without an explicit file:// protocol can be clicked
  • Triple-click-and-drag now works if triple click starts on a blank line

More Linux-specific fixes and feature enhancements include:

  • Titlebar now auto-hides in fullscreen (restored when exiting fullscreen
  • New gtk-titlebar-hide-when-maximized configuration option
  • New gtk-custom-css configuration to load custom CSS to theme GTK elements
  • window-title-font-family config setting now works on Linux
  • Declares StartupWMClass in .desktop file for dock/taskbar pinning
  • Multiple custom-shader values are now supported (matching macOS)
  • Dropping files and selected text on Ghostty now works on Linux
  • “Open in Ghostty” shortcut for Nautilus is available
  • Menu separator colors now match the system theme
  • Fractional scaling fixes
  • Font scaling on Wayland now uses gtk-xft-dpi
  • ctrl / shift + insert bindings now secondary defaults for copy/paste
  • Paste preview text is now monospace in GTK4

More details on Ghostty 1.1.0 can be divined through the official documentation site.

Install Ghostty on Ubuntu

Like what you see?

Installing Ghostty on Ubuntu isn’t as straight-forward as for other Linux distributions.

Pre-built officials binaries are only provided for macOS, and official packages for a handful of Linux distros (like Arch and Gentoo). Users on other Linux distros can build it from source or make of use community-contributed builds instead.

For Ubuntu, software engineer Mike Kasberg offers Ghostty DEBs for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 24.10 (including ARM) on GitHub (PPA is planned), while Adithya Ps’ distro-agnostic Ghostty AppImage is another method.