New Year, New Terminal Setup With Ghostty

Ghostty

I’ve had the same terminal setup for years. Every year it gets some minor changes, usually in the form of additions. Over time, the whole setup has slowed down and fell into a state of being a mess rather than optimal or thought out. With the release of Ghostty, it seemed like a good time to rethink my whole setup.

Ghostty

Ghostty is the creation of the famed Mitchell Hashimoto. He’s a founder of Hashicorp and creator of some of the most well known infrastructure open source projects, like Terraform.

Ghostty is a terminal that has performance and customizability in mind. It’s open source, cross platform, and has a growing feature set. What caught my attention was the performance and customizability. The image at the top is my setup on on Mac and the image just below is my setup on Linux.

Ghostty on Linux

Both of these are a custom configuration to look this way but it only takes a few lines of configuration to look like this.

Starship Prompt

My prompt is powered by Starship. I was first introduced to Starship when it was there by default in Bluefin and I decided to try it out. I try at least one new distro/setup per year and I tried out Bluefin in 2024.

Startship is fast and customizable. Speed was a target for me because my previous setup had a noticeable lag, at times.

Zsh Autocomplete

I use Zsh as my shell and have setup autocomplete for most of the applications I regularly use. The example pictured here is for Helm.

Autocomplete Example

History Searching

One of my favorite plugins for Zsh is zsh-history-substring-search. It provides Fish shells history search feature. Being able to type all or part of a command and being able to easily search the history for it is really useful to me.

Autosuggestion

A plugin for zsh I’ve been trying out, but have not committed to, is zsh-autosuggestion. This plugin uses your history to suggest the command to run. This is useful if, like me, you use the same command a lot.

television

I regularly have things, like test results, that I need to search through. For that, I’m using television. My search into a tool to help me here was due to Ghostty lacking a search feature (it’s coming) and I needed something to help me in the interim. Television is better search than I had before. Note, I’ve only used this over small and medium size data sets. Nothing massive.

In Conclusion

It feels like a breath of fresh air to have a new and fast terminal setup. Something worth revisiting every now and again.