post: ghostty-config

v2/content/posts/2025/_index.md

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+title = "2025"
+sort_by = "date"
+paginate_by = 5
+transparent = true
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+

v2/content/posts/2025/ghostty-config/index.md

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+title = "Replicating My Alacritty Appearance in Ghostty"
+date = 2025-01-10T08:54:40+10:00
+
+[extra]
+#updated = 2024-07-26T09:58:10+10:00
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+
+[Ghostty] by Mitchell Hashimoto is the new hotness in the terminal emulator
+world. It recently came out of private beta launching publicly as 1.0. It's
+similar to other GPU accelerated terminal emulators like [Alacritty] and
+[Kitty], but differs in that it uses the native toolkit on macOS and Linux
+(GTK). For nerds it's also interesting because it's implemented in [Zig].
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+Initially I dismissed Ghostty as not offering me anything over my current
+terminal emulator, [Alacritty]. Largely because of my use of the [Awesome window
+manager][awesomewm]. Using a tiling window manager means I have no need for tabs in my
+terminal emulator, and I have Awesome configured to show no window decorations
+on most windows. I thought this meant that Ghostty using a native UI offered me
+very little. However, after some recent discussions I noted that Ghostty did
+support two longstanding missing features in Alacritty:
+
+1. Text rendering with ligatures
+2. Bitmap image support, such as sixel
+
+This prompted me to take another look at Ghostty. I set about tweaking the
+settings to remove all the UI chrome and get the theme to match my Alacritty
+config. This is the result:
+
+{{ figure(image="posts/2025/ghostty-config/ghostty-fastfetch.png",
+   link="posts/2025/ghostty-config/ghostty-fastfetch.png",
+   width="700",
+   alt="Screenshot of the output of fastfetch in Ghostty.",
+   caption="fastfetch output in Ghostty.") }}
+
+Compared to Alacritty:
+
+{{ figure(image="posts/2025/ghostty-config/alacritty-fastfetch.png",
+   link="posts/2025/ghostty-config/alacritty-fastfetch.png",
+   width="700",
+   alt="Screenshot of the output of fastfetch in Ghostty. It's slightly narrower than the Ghostty output.",
+   caption="fastfetch output in Alacritty.") }}
+
+For some reason Ghostty is rendering PragmataPro slightly wider than Alacritty
+despite them both being set to the same font size.
+
+Finally here's a sample document in [mdcat] showing image and ligature support:
+
+{{ figure(image="posts/2025/ghostty-config/ghostty-mdcat.png",
+   link="posts/2025/ghostty-config/ghostty-mdcat.png",
+   width="700",
+   alt="Screenshot of the output of mdcat rendering a showcase Markdown file that includes formatting, images, and ligatures.",
+   caption="mdcat rendering a sample Markdown document.") }}
+
+With the visuals out of the way, now I just need to spend some time with
+Ghostty to see how it compares in practice. My configuration for both terminal
+emulators can be found in my dotfiles repo:
+
+- [Alacritty](https://github.com/wezm/dotfiles/blob/master/config/alacritty/alacritty.yml) (I need to migrate this one to TOML)
+- [Ghostty](https://github.com/wezm/dotfiles/blob/master/config/ghostty/config)
+
+[Alacritty]: https://alacritty.org/
+[awesomewm]: https://awesomewm.org/
+[Ghostty]: https://ghostty.org/
+[Kitty]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
+[mdcat]: https://github.com/swsnr/mdcat
+[Zig]: https://ziglang.org/