Ghostty 1.4 Arrives with Major Improvements for Linux

Ghostty 1.4.0 is a major update to the open-source terminal emulator, arriving after seven months of development. It adds performance improvements across Linux and macOS, a standalone SSH wrapper, more accurate terminal emulation, and new ways to manage terminal splits.

One of the headline additions is complete support for the Kitty graphics protocol, including animation and relative image placement. Ghostty is the first terminal other than Kitty to support the full protocol. The release also implements the Kitty clipboard protocol.

Lower memory use and sharper text on Linux

When the terminal is idle, Ghostty 1.4 compresses off-screen scrollback. This can cut the physical memory used by text-heavy terminal histories by up to 90%. Content is decompressed when you scroll back or use the text-search feature introduced in Ghostty 1.3.

The Linux GTK app also renders text more sharply at fractional display scales, including 125% and 150%. Its rendering system has been updated to use an EGL pipeline on a separate thread, passing frames to GTK with DMA-BUFs. Systems whose GPUs cannot export DMA-BUFs fall back to slower CPU-based copying.

GTK users can now rearrange terminal splits by dragging them. Each split in a tab with multiple panes has a handle that can be dragged onto another split.

Other Linux improvements include notifications that dismiss when the terminal is focused or closed, updated Noto emoji support, and fixes for split resizing and mouse-cursor behaviour. Dolphin’s “Open Ghostty Here” action now opens a window in an existing Ghostty instance, and URLs are opened through the XDG desktop portal. New GTK settings let users disable tab switching with two-finger horizontal scrolling or move tab close buttons to the beginning of each tab.

Installing Ghostty 1.4.0

Ghostty is available in the Ubuntu repositories, but that version may not include this release. Ubuntu users can get Ghostty through a community-maintained DEB package, its associated PPA, an AppImage, or an unofficial Snap.

Official macOS binaries are available from Ghostty and support in-app updates. The app is also offered through Homebrew.

Ghostty 1.4 requires GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7, so Ubuntu 24.04 LTS no longer meets the project’s GTK and Adwaita requirements. As a result, Ghostty DEB packages can no longer be installed on that release.

The libghostty terminal-emulation library is also set to power terminals in future versions of JetBrains IDEs.