Ghostty Terminal Emulator

Ghostty (bundle ID com.mitchellh.ghostty) is a free, open-source terminal emulator for macOS and Linux, created by Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp). It gives you a command-line window — like macOS's built-in Terminal app — but with GPU-accelerated rendering (using Apple's Metal on Mac), native split panes, tabs, extensive theme support, and shell integration. On macOS it is built with a SwiftUI interface, so it looks and behaves like a proper native Mac app. It launched publicly at version 1.0 in December 2024 and is actively maintained.

ghostty — owned by Mitchell Hashimoto / ghostty-org (open-source community project).

When it runs hot: Because macOS treats Ghostty as the "responsible process" for everything running inside it, high CPU or energy figures shown next to Ghostty often reflect work done by your shell, a compiler, a build script, or another program running inside the terminal window — not Ghostty itself. Genuinely high usage by Ghostty alone (nothing heavy running inside it) can point to rapid log output flooding the screen, a very large scrollback buffer, or a rendering hiccup. Closing unused tabs or panes and reducing fast-scrolling output usually brings things back down.
Safety tier: Safe — User-owned and reversible — acting carries no real risk.
Safe action: quit
Worst case: Closing Ghostty will end your terminal session and any command-line programs running inside it. Unsaved work in a text editor or a long-running command (like a build or file transfer) inside the terminal will be interrupted. No system files are at risk — only whatever you were doing in the terminal window itself.

Sources

Sourced by Anomalous — this is the published corpus entry that grounds the ghostty diagnosis card, not a language-model guess. Browse the whole process corpus.

Spotted something wrong or missing? Anomalous is open source, and its process corpus takes pull requests. Contribute on GitHub →