Ghostty 1.4.0

Ghostty 1.4.0 is a major terminal-emulator release built over seven months, with 2,889 commits from 172 contributors. Its headline changes are substantially lower memory use and faster terminal processing, alongside full support for the Kitty graphics specification. Ghostty now animates Kitty-protocol images, supports image placements relative to one another, and parses large image payloads about 16 times faster in benchmarks. It compresses off-screen scrollback, typically cutting its physical memory use by 70-90%, allowing the default history limit to rise from 10 MB to 50 MB. Empty terminals and hidden tabs also consume less memory and GPU resources.

Performance gains span input, rendering, resizing, search, and startup. On macOS, separating terminal-output reading from parsing improves I/O throughput by 25-55%; parser benchmarks show plain-text processing rising from 128 MB/s to 725 MB/s. The GTK renderer has been redesigned around EGL and DMABUF, improving fractional-scale text clarity and reducing rendering work on the main thread. The release also adds Kitty’s clipboard protocol, enabling terminal programs to work with formats beyond plain text, and updates compatibility for macOS 27 while retaining support for macOS 13 and later. Security fixes address risks involving pasted commands, malicious graphics or terminal output, shell integration, and unsafe links; several require user interaction, while others can be triggered by displaying hostile output.