Ghostty 1.4 brings full Kitty graphics support and performance & memory improvements

Ghostty 1.4 has officially launched, delivering compatibility with macOS 27 “Golden Gate” alongside a suite of high-performance upgrades that position the terminal emulator as a leader in modern terminal development. The update resolves key visual issues from the previous 1.3.1 release, including tab bar rendering problems and transparency glitches, while maintaining backward compatibility through macOS 13 “Ventura”. Beyond platform support, the standout addition is full implementation of the Kitty graphics protocol, making Ghostty the first terminal outside Kitty itself to achieve 100% specification coverage. Animated images now render smoothly rather than as static frames, with support for frame transmission, composition, and playback control. Relative placements further enhance this capability by allowing hierarchical image positioning where child images move with their parents.

Performance improvements are also part of this release, headlined by scrollback compression that reduces physical memory consumption by 70% to 90% for typical text-heavy history. This optimization allows the default scrollback limit to increase from 10 MB to 50 MB per terminal without exceeding prior memory footprints. On Linux and FreeBSD, a new OpenGL rendering pipeline eliminates GtkGLArea dependencies, delivers crisp text under fractional scaling, and reduces tearing through triple-buffered rendering. The Kitty clipboard protocol now enables programs to read and write arbitrary clipboard data including images and HTML, not just plain text. Additional enhancements include split drag-and-drop for GTK (matching macOS functionality from 1.3), a new ghostty +ssh CLI wrapper for seamless SSH integration, and broad terminal emulation accuracy fixes validated against Thomas Dickey's esctest conformance suite. VT processing speeds increased 5.7x for ASCII text, I/O throughput rose 25% to 55% on macOS, and new terminals use just 16 KiB of page memory compared to 128 KiB previously. Security-minded users will note that potentially abusive sequences remain disabled by default.

The release represents Ghostty's most substantial feature cadence yet, combining cutting-edge protocol support with pragmatic performance gains. For most terminal enthusiasts, version 1.4 delivers immediate value through reduced memory overhead, faster rendering, and broader protocol compatibility without compromising the stability that has defined the project since its inception.