The GPU-accelerated Ghostty terminal emulator just released version 1.4, with improved performance, lower memory use, and a new rendering pipeline for Linux and FreeBSD.
One of the biggest improvements is scrollback compression, which reduces physical memory used by inactive terminal history by 70% to 90% for typical text-heavy workloads. Compression occurs when the terminal is idle, and data decompresses automatically when users scroll back or search previous output.
Thanks to this optimization, the default scrollback limit increased from 10 MB to 50 MB per terminal. According to the developers, even with the larger limit, compressed history generally uses less physical memory than before. This functionality is available on 64-bit Linux and macOS.
Performance has also improved considerably. Internal benchmarks show plain ASCII text parsing is now 5.7 times faster, rising from 128 MB/s to 725 MB/s. Processing real-world terminal recordings is about 25% faster, while resizing terminals with large scrollback history can be up to six times faster.
For Linux and FreeBSD users, Ghostty 1.4 introduces a redesigned OpenGL rendering pipeline. The GTK application no longer relies on GtkGLArea but uses EGL to render frames on a dedicated thread before passing them to GTK through DMABUF.
The new implementation uses triple buffering to reduce screen tearing and improve text sharpness when fractional display scaling is enabled. In particular, text and box-drawing characters now appear sharper at scaling levels like 125% and 150%. On systems where GPU drivers cannot export DMABUFs, Ghostty falls back to transferring frames through the CPU.
Another addition is complete support for the Kitty graphics protocol. Ghostty can now display animated images directly in the terminal and supports relative image placements, allowing applications to position images in relation to one another.
SSH functionality has been improved as well with a new ghostty +ssh command, which acts as a wrapper around the standard SSH client. It automatically installs Ghostty’s terminfo on remote machines and forwards relevant environment variables.
On the desktop usability side, the GTK version now supports rearranging terminal splits using drag and drop. Users can move splits between tabs and windows while preserving running processes, working directories, and terminal contents. Additional improvements include faster scrollback searching, new configuration options, and updated Unicode 18 support.
Finally, Linux users should be aware of updated system requirements. Ghostty 1.4 now requires GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7, meaning Ubuntu 24.04 LTS no longer meets the requirements for a native build against its standard libraries. The developers recommend using the Flatpak package or an older Ghostty version on distributions that lack the necessary dependencies.
For additional details, see the announcement.
