About
Ghostty is a terminal emulator from Mitchell Hashimoto, the co-founder of HashiCorp, who spent years building it before shipping 1.0 in December 2024. Written in Zig, it refuses the usual trade-off between speed and polish: rendering is GPU-accelerated via Metal, while the chrome is genuine AppKit and SwiftUI, so tabs, splits and windows behave exactly as macOS intends rather than imitating it from a cross-platform toolkit.
It supports modern terminal standards including the Kitty graphics protocol, font ligatures and shell integration, and adds conveniences such as a drop-down quick terminal summoned by hotkey. Development is brisk: version 1.3 arrived in March 2026, backed by one of the most active open-source communities in the category. The whole thing is free under the MIT licence, which makes its level of finish all the more remarkable.
Alternatives
- iTerm2
Pick iTerm2 if your Mac is on an older system: it is free, open source under GPL v2, and works on macOS 10.14 or newer, where Ghostty needs macOS 13.
- Terminal
Stay with Terminal if your needs are basic: it comes with every Mac, costs nothing and needs no install, so there is nothing extra to download or buy.
At a Glance
- Requires
- macOS 13 Ventura or later
- Price
- Free and open source (MIT licence)
- Also On
- Linux
- Get It From
- ghostty.org
Curator's Note
“The first terminal in years that feels like it was designed for the Mac rather than ported to it.”
Theo, Mac Dept.
