Ghostty 1.4 Released: History Limit Increased Fivefold, Yet Memory Usage Is Lower

Beating AI News Flash: Terminal emulator Ghostty releases 1.4.0, developed over 7 months with nearly 2,900 code commits from 172 contributors. This release focuses on solving memory usage issues during long-term terminal use, with notable improvements in performance and graphics support.

The new version automatically compresses off-screen scrollback history when the terminal is idle, and decompresses on demand when scrolling back or searching. Plain text records can save 70% to 90% of physical memory after compression, and the default history limit has been raised from 10MB to 50MB per terminal. Even when full, it typically uses less memory than the old version. Currently supports macOS and 64-bit Linux.

Background tabs no longer continuously consume GPU resources. Official testing on macOS with 1 visible tab and 20 background tabs showed GPU memory usage dropping from approximately 385MiB to 18MiB. The terminal output reading method has also been rewritten, improving data throughput on macOS by 25% to 55%. Directly outputting a 150MB text file with `cat` now takes 566 milliseconds instead of 1.5 seconds.

Ghostty also completed support for animation and relative positioning in the Kitty graphics protocol. Previously, GIF animations displayed in the terminal would only show a static frame; now they play properly. The founder claims this is the first terminal besides Kitty to fully implement the graphics protocol.

The new version also supports macOS 27, switches Linux to EGL-based rendering, and adds `ghostty +ssh`, which can automatically install the required terminal configuration when connecting to remote servers.

This release also fixes 10 security vulnerabilities. One involves Kitty graphics commands, where an attacker only needs to trick the terminal into displaying malicious output to potentially cause program crashes, abnormal memory usage, and in specific cases even read or delete files outside the temporary directory.