> No ⌘. sending CTRL-C

This comment sounded familiar[0]. :) For what it's worth, still possible with:

  keybind = "cmd+.=text:\x03"

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42889411

Haha, thanks again :)

I've been delaying a major migration to NeoVim on [modern-terminal-I-can-never-decide-which] for years. Wezterm, Ghostty, iTerm2. None is exactly perfect, so I just keep watching them develop.

I recently migrated from vim to neovim and you can just migrate everything. I forgot where I found this but put this in ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

  " Load vim configs

set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after let &packpath = &runtimepath source ~/.vimrc

Then in my zshrc (well... I organize differently) I have the function

  function _exists() {
    command -v "$1" &> /dev/null
  }

  alias_vim() {
    if (_exists nvim)
    then
        alias vi='nvim'
        alias vim='nvim'
    elif (_exists vim)
    then
        alias vi='vim'
    fi
  }

FWIW, zsh has a commands hash to make stuff like this potentially easier and cleaner. The following isn't quite how I'd do it, but is functionally equivalent.

    (( $+commands[vim] )) && alias vi=vim
    (( $+commands[nvim] )) && alias vi{,m}=nvim

I wasn't aware of +commands, thanks. Though I'm not sure this is easier and you can translate mine to bash trivially

Yours isn't technically equivalent though it is functionally. If we have both vim and nvim then we'll alias vi twice.

Also, your program provides less clarity. It saves lines but at a large cost to readability. I tend to share my dotfiles with newbies a lot so readability is very meaningful.

I wrap mine up in functions too because at the end of my alias file I can add something like this

  # aliases.zsh
  main() {
    alias_ls || echo "ls aliasing failed"
    alias_vim || echo "vim aliasing vailed"
  }

  main

It's a bit overkill and I never expect a simple alias like that to fail but there are three distinct advantages I get for being just a tad more verbose:

1) I have more complicated versions to deal with things like fd and batcat which have different names different operating systems (`fd` vs `fd-find` / `bat` vs `batcat`) and some additional configurations.

2) I can disable the alias by commenting out one line

3) knowing exactly where the alias is being loaded and thus what aliases are loaded.

Bonus) fails loudly but continues (it's an alias, I don't want you fail fail)

A few extra keystrokes are worth this advantage imo. Especially since I'm using vim so it's actually not any additional typing lol

It's style, so the choice is up to you and they'll accomplish the same things, but I'm just explaining why I use this design pattern. I've only given a stripped down snippet of code so I hope this context helps explain the larger pictures and how it can be used for larger needs.

(Surely this issue must've been discussed/debated elsewhere ad nauseum because it seems an odd design decision to leave out such a common macos binding...)

But having only used ghostty as-is and getting bamboozled by the copy paste situation, this is game changing. I was just going to wait till preferences had a GUI/TUI.. So thanks!

Search in scroll back is coming in 1.3, unfortunately that's going to be 6 months away.

There's a lot happening in the Ghostty app though, check out the 1.2 release notes

Is there a blog post anywhere that explains why it has taken so long to get search working? Ghostty is such a nice app but that's such a fundamental feature that there has to be a good reason... It's the only thing keeping me on iTerm2.

Try Cmd-Shift-J. It dumps your buffer to a temp file, with the file path made ready for you. I do that and then open the temp file with vi.

That's the workaround I've used. I still want to be able to just press command F and see "error" highlighted throughout the scrollback.

Does nobody use grep?

How can you use grep to search the scrollback/screen buffer?

I don't want to presume your use case, but Ghostty has a command for dumping the buffer to a file, which I use for processing output "too late" to use grep.

keybind = ctrl+alt+shift+o=write_scrollback_file:open

Try a pager instead. Batcat is more feature rich but there's always the good old less (and more) command. Both work great with grep. I do things like the following multiple times a day

  $ cat foo.log | less
  $ cat foo.log | $PAGER
  $ cat foo.log | grep 09-23-2025 | less

Side note / pro tip: on a new line in the terminal press control-x control-e. If you're in zsh you need to edit your config but this will work out of the box for bash.

You can leave the cat at home.

  less foo.log
  grep 09-25-2025 foo.log | less

but he will feel lonely if he doesn't participate :(

Ghostty has a write_scrollback_file action you can use to write the scrollback to a temporary file. I have this set to cmd+shift+f, so I simply

less [cmd+shift+f] [enter]

You can use grep similarly.

What good is grep if you want to search the build log on your screen that took an hour in the making? Should have thought of tee-ing it, well duh.

You just rawdog that to stdout without a log file?

I do. Setting up log files for each and every command seems tedious. I would rather just cmd+f to search and have it work for everything, as it is a property of the terminal, rather than a specific command.

Of course. Why not? I can use the terminal's search facility to search its infinite scrollback buffer.

If I don't anticipate problems, or things are slower than I thought? Sure

"Do you not have phones?"

Best news I've heard all day.

> - No ⌘. sending CTRL-C (muscle memory and being advertised as native to the Mac is what one would expect).

For what it's worth, that shortcut also doesn't work in the Jetbrains terminal, Alacritty, Kitty, and even iTerm2. The only terminal emulator I've tried so far where that works is the built-in Terminal.app.

By the rollercoaster of points this post is experiencing, I may have expressed myself poorly. To be clear, the concept of a modern, cross-platform Terminal core with native GUI implementations for each major vendor is amazing and I'm very glad it exists. It's just not quite there yet for me and I don't know if it ever will be. But I'm very excited by it and hopeful.

It’s weird to me that they consider GTK a “native” implementation — GTK is a whole [opinionated] layer of abstraction on top of the native interfaces.

It’s native in the sense that it’s not Electron, or Java, but it’s still a layer of abstraction which introduces all sorts of quirks.

I was also downvoted for mentioning a few other minor things it is missing as well. While I'm holding out, it's getting there however.

Same here. Mentioned 3 different bugs that happened to me recently, but it looks like it's deemed uncalled for or something.

Should be soon: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

6 months. 1.3 does not release until March 2026.

Maybe sooner in the nightly builds then :)

Interesting, I really prefer the font rendering in Ghostty! I'm with you on the first two items, though.

Despite these shortcomings I still use it daily since the first time I tried it, and have come to really love the project in general. I often won't hop to new software if it offers friction like this, but Ghostty pulled me in despite some snags.

Zed is also wonderful software, though it took me way longer to commit to using it daily.

I want to like it too. I even joined the Discord I was so excited about it. Unfortunately even at version 1.2.0, which I understand is a total rewrite on Linux, it's only usable for minutes before this bug kicks in https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2210

> No ⌘. sending CTRL-C

Wait wait wait, this is a shortcut in Mac??

Seriously. I've been using Macs since... ahem... 1985... and did not know this.

It means cancel, stop. You can use it to stop progress bars, dismiss dialog boxes, terminate some well-behaved spinning beach balls, cancel a drag before dropping, etc. It's been on the platform since the classic Mac OS days.

I was wondering why the shortcut for stopping a running program in Xcode was cmd+. Now I know

A few other ugly quirks in Linux:

- It doesn’t respect the user’s configured fonts. - Clipboard support is inconsistent. - The GTK4 UI is quirky, and has silly slow animations in situations which don’t make sense.

The first two sound like more serious issues, and I’m surprised that others haven’t found them dealbreakers.

Interesting, are there issues on the tracker pertinent to those problems?

the second bullet single-handedly keeps me in WezTerm (copy/select mode)

Not to mention that every time you ssh to another server your keyboard stops working correctly.

The solution is on their website:

> infocmp -x xterm-ghostty | ssh YOUR-SERVER -- tic -x -

I mean... I could learn what it does, but no way on earth I am going to be typing something like that every time I want to ssh somewhere.

(This is somehow fixed in 1.2 but it requires additional entry in the config for whatever reason. Can't it just work?)

> (This is somehow fixed in 1.2 but it requires additional entry in the config for whatever reason. Can't it just work?)

"For whatever reason": because it requires modifying `ssh` and doing that by default is a really sketchy thing to do because it is a very security sensitive tool. No program (Ghostty included) should be mucking with that by default. We want users to be aware.

"Can't it just work?": No, because the entire mechanism is flawed, and I didn't invent the mechanism. It's like asking, "why must I drive to my destination, can't I just teleport?" The entire premise of the question is silly, and it's not the car's fault (Ghostty is the car in this example). For those who want to learn more about "the mechanism": read Ghostty's terminfo page, but also just do some light web searching on how terminfo works. Its a total nightmare.

I really wish that weren't the case, I really do. I promise its just as annoying to me as a user and more annoying to me as a maintainer to have to hear people complain about this repeatedly when I'm not doing anything wrong, personally. I'm playing by the rules. The rules are just bullshit.

We'll continue to make enhancements to improve this while we wait for Ghostty's terminfo to propagate to every machine in the world. It will, it'll just take... a long time. Next up we plan on introducing a `ghostty +ssh` command that you can drop-in replace most `ssh` usage with and it'll automagically just work.

Ouch, I did not expect my complaining would get a response from the author!

Just to be clear, I do think Ghostty is amazing piece of software and it's so fast that it's hard to believe, so thank you for the hard work.

> read Ghostty's terminfo page, but also just do some light web searching on how terminfo works. Its a total nightmare.

Oh, yea, I totally get that. I actually _did_ try to understand what the issue is, but gave up on that time-sink rabbit hole and decided I might give it another try once the xterm-ghostty is more popular.

In theory one can set TERMINFO to the actual terminfo string, but sadly openssh (and I suspect other ssh clients/servers) don't pass that on.

Has the ghostty terminfo been added to ncurses?

  SetEnv TERM=xterm-256color

in your ssh config stanza will fix that