Ghostty 1.4: what the speed and memory numbers mean, and where tmux still fits

Ghostty 1.4.0 shipped on October 27, 2026 after seven months of work by 172 contributors across 2,889 commits. The headline figures come from the release notes. Here is what they mean if you just want the terminal to feel quick.

Speed

On an M4 Max Mac, plain ASCII parsing went from 128 MB/s to 725 MB/s, about 5.7 times faster. Throughput through the pty, the pipe between the window and your shell, rose 25% to 55% over the 1.3.x releases. You notice it when a build prints thousands of lines or you cat a large log. Resizing a window with 10,000 lines of history is about six times faster.

Memory

Ghostty now compresses idle scrollback, which cuts physical memory use by 70% to 90% for typical text. Because history got cheaper, the default scrollback limit per terminal went from 10 MB to 50 MB. A new, empty terminal on macOS uses about 16 KiB of page memory, down from 128 KiB in 1.3.1.

Images, Linux and security

• Full support for the published Kitty graphics protocol, including animation. The release notes say Ghostty is the first terminal other than Kitty itself to get there.
• On Linux and FreeBSD, a new EGL-based renderer adds triple buffering and true fractional scaling.
• The release closes 10 published GitHub security advisories, covering paste protection, Kitty graphics, tmux control mode and macOS link handling.
• GTK builds now require GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7, so older long-term-support distributions may not have a ready package.

Where tmux fits

tmux is a terminal multiplexer, not a terminal. It runs inside any terminal, and its sessions keep running after you close the window or lose an SSH connection. That use stays the same inside Ghostty. If you rely on tmux for persistent remote sessions, keep it.

One common snag is a remote host that does not recognise Ghostty's terminal type, which can garble colours or keys inside tmux. The new ghostty +ssh user@server command wraps ssh, installs Ghostty's terminfo on the remote host and forwards your environment variables.

Should you switch?

If you open a terminal a few times a week, the stock Terminal app is fine. If you spend hours a day in it, the release notes give you a speed and memory reason to try Ghostty for a week next to your current setup. I did not test Warp or other terminals for this write-up, so I make no comparison with them.

Install steps, a comparison table and the libghostty outlook are in the original: https://syntaxradar.com/radar/tmux-ghostty-guide-should-you-switch