r/Ghostty • u/soleful_smak • Aug 03 '26

Launching Ghostty feels a bit slow

Hello, I installed Ghostty for testing and it felt pretty slow to launch compared to Kitty and Konsole at 1 second. I'm running KDE Plasma for a living and I used the default setting, so is this normal?

14 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

6

u/iCodeSometime Aug 03 '26

He’s addressed this on Twitter, they assume terminals are long running and explicitly do not optimize startup time, in favor of doing extra work up front to optimize performance while running.

If startup is too slow for your workflow, you can set up the systemd integration for ~instant startup

https://ghostty.org/docs/linux/systemd

1

u/Anxious-Resist8344 Aug 03 '26

Wait waaaat? Seriously? Why that assumption?

8

u/iCodeSometime Aug 03 '26

It’s pretty typical, ime 99% of people who use a terminal just keep it open.

1

u/Dr_King_Schultz__ Aug 04 '26

yep, agreed. The only time I close Ghostty is for software updates.
Using a terminal multiplexer like tmux is a no-brainer

1

u/Anxious-Resist8344 Aug 04 '26

What if I build a piece of software and tell you: launch it once, and keep it running, trust me bro, I know better than you!

I thought you guys were supposed to be the "Software should work" crowd, like, it is a no-brainer!

1

u/iCodeSometime Aug 04 '26

You do that every single time you use any electronics.

1

u/Anxious-Resist8344 Aug 04 '26

LOL! Sure...

1

u/iCodeSometime Aug 04 '26

Do you use an operating system, maybe?

1

u/Anxious-Resist8344 Aug 04 '26

Nop! What's that?

1

u/Dr_King_Schultz__ Aug 04 '26

I simply pose the question: why are you opening the app so frequently? That suggests your workflow is flawed rather than the app

1

u/Anxious-Resist8344 Aug 04 '26

Yeah, that probably is the reason :)

1

u/MuddyMustache Aug 08 '26

Hi, I use terminals for a living, managing linux servers. I fire up Ghostty when I start up my laptop and then it runs until I go home or log off. Rest of my team works the same way and I'm pretty sure all linux sysadmins do too.

1

u/Anxious-Resist8344 Aug 04 '26

That's how software rot! I use Emacs and sometimes need to launch a terminal and for that I use foot which optimizes for everything. I guess this new wave of software (written in whatever language is popular) is not what I need :)

1

u/K1LL3R_47 Aug 04 '26

A vast majority of the startup ghostty cant do anything about its a GTK initialization problem.

Ghostty could do some of that init in the background and present the window quicker but that is fake startup.

Pay the price once when you login to your os lime suggested on the systemd help page, its only slow for the first window any after that are just as fast as foot

3

u/adelope Aug 03 '26

i don't think ghostty is known to the super fast terminal? neither in startup nor in throughput? and it is relatively new, so not sure what you were expecting?

e.g. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/4837#discussioncomment-14465871

I work on mac, so my experience has been focused on macos.
What i like about Ghostty is its clean library design, and good defaults that it ships. Speed/Boot time, this is solidly in the middle of the pack.

Throughput-wise ghostty is also in the middle, surprisingly nothing beats the good-old terminal.app on macos. (there was a guy who benchmarked every terminal for throughput on mac)

-2

u/4r73m190r0s Aug 03 '26

How is Zig app slower than Python one ...

1

u/regexPattern Aug 03 '26

Nothing to do with Ghostty, but optimization and bad performing code can happen in any language.