Ghostty 1.4 compresses idle scrollback and parses plain ASCII at 725 MB/s
Cat-ing a 150 MB text file in Ghostty now takes 566 milliseconds instead of 1.5 seconds, and idle scrollback uses 70 to 90 percent less memory.
Ghostty 1.4 raises macOS I/O throughput 25 to 55 percent, lifts ASCII parsing from 128 MB/s to 725 MB/s, and compresses idle scrollback while raising the default limit from 10 MB to 50 MB. It also plays animated Kitty-protocol images and ships a drop-in `ghostty +ssh` wrapper.
The thread asked what the point of fast terminals is, and the creator answered with something else.
What changed in 1.4
The release notes lead with performance. Reading from the pty while parsing output lifted macOS throughput 25 to 55 percent, plain ASCII parsing went from 128 MB/s to 725 MB/s, and catting a 150 MB file fell from 1.5 seconds to 566 ms. Idle scrollback is compressed, cutting memory for typical text history by 70 to 90 percent on macOS and 64-bit Linux, and the default scrollback limit rose from 10 MB to 50 MB per terminal.
Animated images sent over the Kitty graphics protocol now play, and Ghostty says it covers the full published spec, the first terminal to do so outside Kitty itself. A new clipboard protocol (OSC 5522) lets programs read and write images or HTML, with a permission prompt and a 64 MiB default write cap.
The practical one is ghostty +ssh, a wrapper that installs Ghostty's terminfo on the remote host and falls back to TERM=xterm-256color if that fails. Use it with alias ssh='ghostty +ssh --'.
What the thread wanted to know
A Konsole user said it "is way faster than any of those on my computer" and asked what Ghostty, Kitty and Wezterm bring, missing only iTerm2's tmux -CC integration. A Kitty user said Kitty's hints mode is the one feature keeping them from switching. Another commenter had a Claude Code skill draw a chicken in SVG in the corner of the console, using the image protocol.
Mitchell Hashimoto, Ghostty's creator, used the thread to point past the GUI: libghostty, "the highly portable, embeddable library that provides core terminal emulation, render state, and more", is where he wants the progress noticed.
Mac users on iTerm2 reported no noticeable speed difference on an M1, so the case for switching is the features, not the benchmark.
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