Ghostty

Raised as a usability problem by 40 people on Hacker News over 3 years (2024–2026), in 18 threads.

People raised many different problems with Ghostty, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 42 complaints

Pasting into the terminal search popup doesn't work2026-10-28
Search arrived only in version 1.3, a long wait for a basic feature2026-10-28
Finding obscure config option names is tedious without a settings GUI2026-10-28
Users must hunt for the config file, docs, syntax, keys and values2026-10-28
Finding the config file location, its syntax, and reload behavior takes minutes2026-10-27
No default config file exists, and docs make it hard to guess the correct option names2026-10-27
Default settings are hidden from the config file, so users can't discover which keys exist or what values they take2026-10-27
Terminal becomes unresponsive to input except scrolling, can't select or cancel2026-07-19
Middle-click paste moves the cursor to the mouse pointer and pastes there, which is hazardous2026-07-17
No keyboard shortcut for moving panes, forcing mouse use2026-07-13
Too many tabs with no way to organize them2026-03-12
Arrow keys show raw escape codes until the app is restarted, causing friction2026-03-01
Terminal displays wrongly and typing doesn't work properly over SSH2026-03-01
Tab bar and context menu UI is too awkward to use, making them turn off Ghostty2026-03-01
Changing settings is hard, and SSH broke until extra configuration was applied2026-03-01
Text gets cut off at bottom edge on rounded-corner macOS Tahoe windows2026-03-01
Terminals get squished smaller and smaller as more are added side by side2026-02-22
Forced through a funnel before reporting bugs, adding friction for users2026-01-02
Dropdown terminal mode has been unreliable and gave the commenter bad results2025-12-03
Window stays open after Ctrl+D, which is confusing and annoying2025-12-03
Cmd-backtick window switching is clunky with many windows open2025-12-03
Becomes so slow after about five minutes that it's unusable2025-12-02
Trying the demo requires using the command line, which is awkward2025-12-01
Scrollback-to-file workflow is too inconvenient when using remote systems frequently2025-11-04
Clipboard support is inconsistent on Linux, and fonts ignore the user's configured settings2025-09-24
Terminal lags badly under CPU or GPU load, worse than other terminals2025-09-24
No way to search terminal history, forcing workarounds like tmux or grepping logs2025-09-24
Fonts render so ugly on external monitors it is impossible to use2025-09-24
Escape sequences break when using the terraform CLI on Mac2025-09-17
Terminfo for Ghostty must be manually installed on every remote host2025-08-15
Cmd+F does not search terminal scrollback for error messages2025-01-31
No Cmd-F to search terminal text, forcing copy into an editor2025-01-03
Setting to turn off cursor blinking is ignored despite existing2025-01-02
Input lag is noticeably higher than xfce4-terminal when typing2024-12-30
Out-of-box defaults break a common tool on first launch, unlike Terminal and iTerm2024-12-28
Disabling cursor blinking forces turning off shell integration, losing native scrolling2024-12-28
Closing a shell with Ctrl-D closes all windows or leaves an empty window2024-12-27
Cmd+A selects whole screen and Option+Shift+Arrow types escape codes instead of selecting words2024-12-27
Can't find how to remove the header bar and get a normal menu bar on Linux2024-12-27
Config options are hard to explore and docs lack search, making features hard to find2024-12-27
Tabs don't work in non-native fullscreen, a dealbreaker for the commenter2024-12-26
Left Option cannot act as Esc+, making Emacs nearly impossible to use2024-12-26