alt Hacker NewsI have no understanding of any of this except that Ghostty is an alternative to iTerm2. Can someone do a ELI5 for the uninitiated?
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That actually pretty much is the ELI5. Its merely a different terminal that offers more features than iTerm2 and also runs on OSX.
Unless you actually need/want those features (which, although I am a terminal aficionado, I must admit are niche as fuck), pick whichever terminal makes you happy. Features that are important to some people are performance, Unicode support, and OS support.
The most decidedly non-ELI5 feature comparison: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2... and https://ucs-detect.readthedocs.io/results.html
I also have ton of questions. Hopefully the author can add more documentation to ghostty. Right now I don't fully understand the use cases or how people may benefit from ghostty.
This runs in the browser, so it would allow you to connect to a server from your browser and render normal terminal commands in that environment
For instance if you're a cloud provider, and you want people to be able to "drop in a shell" on a machine, but make that available through the web, you could use this
Ghostty is a terminal like iTerm. This compiles it so it runs in the browser directly, or browser-based environments like VS Code or the Hyper terminal. Without that you’d have to reimplement a whole terminal in JavaScript. Which is what people have been doing with via the xterm.js project. Naturally, there is effort and bugs that go into maintaining a clone/port like that. This lets you use the Ghostty terminal code directly - compiled to WebAssembly and with no other dependencies - as an API-compatible drop-in replacement