Reference

This is a reference of all Ghostty configuration options. These options are ordered roughly by how common they are to be used and grouped with related options. I recommend utilizing your browser's search functionality to find the option you're looking for.

In the future, we'll have a more user-friendly way to view and organize these options.

The font families to use.

You can generate the list of valid values using the CLI:

ghostty +list-fonts

This configuration can be repeated multiple times to specify preferred fallback fonts when the requested codepoint is not available in the primary font. This is particularly useful for multiple languages, symbolic fonts, etc.

Notes on emoji specifically: On macOS, Ghostty by default will always use Apple Color Emoji and on Linux will always use Noto Emoji. You can override this behavior by specifying a font family here that contains emoji glyphs.

The specific styles (bold, italic, bold italic) do not need to be explicitly set. If a style is not set, then the regular style (font-family) will be searched for stylistic variants. If a stylistic variant is not found, Ghostty will use the regular style. This prevents falling back to a different font family just to get a style such as bold. This also applies if you explicitly specify a font family for a style. For example, if you set font-family-bold = FooBar and "FooBar" cannot be found, Ghostty will use whatever font is set for font-family for the bold style.

Finally, some styles may be synthesized if they are not supported. For example, if a font does not have an italic style and no alternative italic font is specified, Ghostty will synthesize an italic style by applying a slant to the regular style. If you want to disable these synthesized styles then you can use the font-style configurations as documented below.

You can disable styles completely by using the font-style set of configurations. See the documentation for font-style for more information.

If you want to overwrite a previous set value rather than append a fallback, specify the value as "" (empty string) to reset the list and then set the new values. For example:

font-family = ""
font-family = "My Favorite Font"

Setting any of these as CLI arguments will automatically clear the values set in configuration files so you don't need to specify --font-family="" before setting a new value. You only need to specify this within config files if you want to clear previously set values in configuration files or on the CLI if you want to clear values set on the CLI.

Changing this configuration at runtime will only affect new terminals, i.e. new windows, tabs, etc.

The named font style to use for each of the requested terminal font styles. This looks up the style based on the font style string advertised by the font itself. For example, "Iosevka Heavy" has a style of "Heavy".

You can also use these fields to completely disable a font style. If you set the value of the configuration below to literal false then that font style will be disabled. If the running program in the terminal requests a disabled font style, the regular font style will be used instead.

These are only valid if its corresponding font-family is also specified. If no font-family is specified, then the font-style is ignored unless you're disabling the font style.

Control whether Ghostty should synthesize a style if the requested style is not available in the specified font-family.

Ghostty can synthesize bold, italic, and bold italic styles if the font does not have a specific style. For bold, this is done by drawing an outline around the glyph of varying thickness. For italic, this is done by applying a slant to the glyph. For bold italic, both of these are applied.

Synthetic styles are not perfect and will generally not look as good as a font that has the style natively. However, they are useful to provide styled text when the font does not have the style.

Set this to "false" or "true" to disable or enable synthetic styles completely. You can disable specific styles using "no-bold", "no-italic", and "no-bold-italic". You can disable multiple styles by separating them with a comma. For example, "no-bold,no-italic".

Available style keys are: bold, italic, bold-italic.

If synthetic styles are disabled, then the regular style will be used instead if the requested style is not available. If the font has the requested style, then the font will be used as-is since the style is not synthetic.

Warning

An easy mistake is to disable bold or italic but not bold-italic. Disabling only bold or italic will NOT disable either in the bold-italic style. If you want to disable bold-italic, you must explicitly disable it. You cannot partially disable bold-italic.

By default, synthetic styles are enabled.

Apply a font feature. To enable multiple font features you can repeat this multiple times or use a comma-separated list of feature settings.

The syntax for feature settings is as follows, where feat is a feature:

• Enable features with e.g. feat, +feat, feat on, feat=1.
• Disabled features with e.g. -feat, feat off, feat=0.
• Set a feature value with e.g. feat=2, feat = 3, feat 4.
• Feature names may be wrapped in quotes, meaning this config should be syntactically compatible with the font-feature-settings CSS property.

The syntax is fairly loose, but invalid settings will be silently ignored.

The font feature will apply to all fonts rendered by Ghostty. A future enhancement will allow targeting specific faces.

To disable programming ligatures, use -calt since this is the typical feature name for programming ligatures. To look into what font features your font has and what they do, use a font inspection tool such as fontdrop.info.

To generally disable most ligatures, use -calt, -liga, -dlig.

Font size in points. This value can be a non-integer and the nearest integer pixel size will be selected. If you have a high dpi display where 1pt = 2px then you can get an odd numbered pixel size by specifying a half point.

For example, 13.5pt @ 2px/pt = 27px

Changing this configuration at runtime will only affect new terminals, i.e. new windows, tabs, etc. Note that you may still not see the change depending on your window-inherit-font-size setting. If that setting is true, only the first window will be affected by this change since all subsequent windows will inherit the font size of the previous window.

On Linux with GTK, font size is scaled according to both display-wide and text-specific scaling factors, which are often managed by your desktop environment (e.g. the GNOME display scale and large text settings).

A repeatable configuration to set one or more font variations values for a variable font. A variable font is a single font, usually with a filename ending in -VF.ttf or -VF.otf that contains one or more configurable axes for things such as weight, slant, etc. Not all fonts support variations; only fonts that explicitly state they are variable fonts will work.

The format of this is id=value where id is the axis identifier. An axis identifier is always a 4 character string, such as wght. To get the list of supported axes, look at your font documentation or use a font inspection tool.

Invalid ids and values are usually ignored. For example, if a font only supports weights from 100 to 700, setting wght=800 will do nothing (it will not be clamped to 700). You must consult your font's documentation to see what values are supported.

Common axes are: wght (weight), slnt (slant), ital (italic), opsz (optical size), wdth (width), GRAD (gradient), etc.

Force one or a range of Unicode codepoints to map to a specific named font. This is useful if you want to support special symbols or if you want to use specific glyphs that render better for your specific font.

The syntax is codepoint=fontname where codepoint is either a single codepoint or a range. Codepoints must be specified as full Unicode hex values, such as U+ABCD. Codepoints ranges are specified as U+ABCD-U+DEFG. You can specify multiple ranges for the same font separated by commas, such as U+ABCD-U+DEFG,U+1234-U+5678=fontname. The font name is the same value as you would use for font-family.

This configuration can be repeated multiple times to specify multiple codepoint mappings.

Changing this configuration at runtime will only affect new terminals, i.e. new windows, tabs, etc.

Draw fonts with a thicker stroke, if supported. This is currently only supported on macOS.

Strength of thickening when font-thicken is enabled.

Valid values are integers between 0 and 255. 0 does not correspond to no thickening, rather it corresponds to the lightest available thickening.

Has no effect when font-thicken is set to false.

This is currently only supported on macOS.

Locations to break font shaping into multiple runs.

A "run" is a contiguous segment of text that is shaped together. "Shaping" is the process of converting text (codepoints) into glyphs (renderable characters). This is how ligatures are formed, among other things. For example, if a coding font turns "!=" into a single glyph, then it must see "!" and "=" next to each other in a single run. When a run is broken, the text is shaped separately. To continue our example, if "!" is at the end of one run and "=" is at the start of the next run, then the ligature will not be formed.

Ghostty breaks runs at certain points to improve readability or usability. For example, Ghostty by default will break runs under the cursor so that text editing can see the individual characters rather than a ligature. This configuration lets you configure this behavior.

Combine values with a comma to set multiple options. Prefix an option with "no-" to disable it. Enabling and disabling options can be done at the same time.

Available options:

• cursor - Break runs under the cursor.

Available since: 1.2.0

What color space to use when performing alpha blending.

This affects the appearance of text and of any images with transparency. Additionally, custom shaders will receive colors in the configured space.

On macOS the default is native, on all other platforms the default is linear-corrected.

Valid values:

• native - Perform alpha blending in the native color space for the OS. On macOS this corresponds to Display P3, and on Linux it's sRGB.

• linear - Perform alpha blending in linear space. This will eliminate the darkening artifacts around the edges of text that are very visible when certain color combinations are used (e.g. red / green), but makes dark text look much thinner than normal and light text much thicker. This is also sometimes known as "gamma correction".

• linear-corrected - Same as linear, but with a correction step applied for text that makes it look nearly or completely identical to native, but without any of the darkening artifacts.

Available since: 1.1.0

All of the configurations behavior adjust various metrics determined by the font. The values can be integers (1, -1, etc.) or a percentage (20%, -15%, etc.). In each case, the values represent the amount to change the original value.

For example, a value of 1 increases the value by 1; it does not set it to literally 1. A value of 20% increases the value by 20%. And so on.

There is little to no validation on these values so the wrong values (e.g. -100%) can cause the terminal to be unusable. Use with caution and reason.

Some values are clamped to minimum or maximum values. This can make it appear that certain values are ignored. For example, many *-thickness adjustments cannot go below 1px.

adjust-cell-height has some additional behaviors to describe:

• The font will be centered vertically in the cell.

• The cursor will remain the same size as the font, but may be adjusted separately with adjust-cursor-height.

• Powerline glyphs will be adjusted along with the cell height so that things like status lines continue to look aligned.

Distance in pixels or percentage adjustment from the bottom of the cell to the text baseline. Increase to move baseline UP, decrease to move baseline DOWN. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Distance in pixels or percentage adjustment from the top of the cell to the top of the underline. Increase to move underline DOWN, decrease to move underline UP. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Thickness in pixels of the underline. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Distance in pixels or percentage adjustment from the top of the cell to the top of the strikethrough. Increase to move strikethrough DOWN, decrease to move strikethrough UP. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Thickness in pixels or percentage adjustment of the strikethrough. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Distance in pixels or percentage adjustment from the top of the cell to the top of the overline. Increase to move overline DOWN, decrease to move overline UP. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Thickness in pixels or percentage adjustment of the overline. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Thickness in pixels or percentage adjustment of the bar cursor and outlined rect cursor. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Height in pixels or percentage adjustment of the cursor. Currently applies to all cursor types: bar, rect, and outlined rect. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Thickness in pixels or percentage adjustment of box drawing characters. See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Height in pixels or percentage adjustment of maximum height for nerd font icons.

Increasing this value will allow nerd font icons to be larger, but won't necessarily force them to be. Decreasing this value will make nerd font icons smaller.

The default value for the icon height is 1.2 times the height of capital letters in your primary font, so something like -16.6% would make icons roughly the same height as capital letters.

See the notes about adjustments in adjust-cell-width.

Available in: 1.2.0

The method to use for calculating the cell width of a grapheme cluster. The default value is unicode which uses the Unicode standard to determine grapheme width. This results in correct grapheme width but may result in cursor-desync issues with some programs (such as shells) that may use a legacy method such as wcswidth.

Valid values are:

• legacy - Use a legacy method to determine grapheme width, such as wcswidth This maximizes compatibility with legacy programs but may result in incorrect grapheme width for certain graphemes such as skin-tone emoji, non-English characters, etc.

  This is called "legacy" and not something more specific because the behavior is undefined and we want to retain the ability to modify it. For example, we may or may not use libc wcswidth now or in the future.

• unicode - Use the Unicode standard to determine grapheme width.

If a running program explicitly enables terminal mode 2027, then unicode width will be forced regardless of this configuration. When mode 2027 is reset, this configuration will be used again.

This configuration can be changed at runtime but will not affect existing terminals. Only new terminals will use the new configuration.

FreeType load flags to enable. The format of this is a list of flags to enable separated by commas. If you prefix a flag with no- then it is disabled. If you omit a flag, its default value is used, so you must explicitly disable flags you don't want. You can also use true or false to turn all flags on or off.

This configuration only applies to Ghostty builds that use FreeType. This is usually the case only for Linux builds. macOS uses CoreText and does not have an equivalent configuration.

Available flags:

• hinting - Enable or disable hinting. Enabled by default.

• force-autohint - Always use the freetype auto-hinter instead of the font's native hinter. Disabled by default.

• monochrome - Instructs renderer to use 1-bit monochrome rendering. This will disable anti-aliasing, and probably not look very good unless you're using a pixel font. Disabled by default.

• autohint - Enable the freetype auto-hinter. Enabled by default.

Example: hinting, no-hinting, force-autohint, no-force-autohint

A theme to use. This can be a built-in theme name, a custom theme name, or an absolute path to a custom theme file. Ghostty also supports specifying a different theme to use for light and dark mode. Each option is documented below.

If the theme is an absolute pathname, Ghostty will attempt to load that file as a theme. If that file does not exist or is inaccessible, an error will be logged and no other directories will be searched.

If the theme is not an absolute pathname, two different directories will be searched for a file name that matches the theme. This is case sensitive on systems with case-sensitive filesystems. It is an error for a theme name to include path separators unless it is an absolute pathname.

The first directory is the themes subdirectory of your Ghostty configuration directory. This is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ghostty/themes or ~/.config/ghostty/themes.

The second directory is the themes subdirectory of the Ghostty resources directory. Ghostty ships with a multitude of themes that will be installed into this directory. On macOS, this list is in the Ghostty.app/Contents/Resources/ghostty/themes directory. On Linux, this list is in the share/ghostty/themes directory (wherever you installed the Ghostty "share" directory.

To see a list of available themes, run ghostty +list-themes.

A theme file is simply another Ghostty configuration file. They share the same syntax and same configuration options. A theme can set any valid configuration option so please do not use a theme file from an untrusted source. The built-in themes are audited to only set safe configuration options.

Some options cannot be set within theme files. The reason these are not supported should be self-evident. A theme file cannot set theme or config-file. At the time of writing this, Ghostty will not show any warnings or errors if you set these options in a theme file but they will be silently ignored.

Any additional colors specified via background, foreground, palette, etc. will override the colors specified in the theme.

To specify a different theme for light and dark mode, use the following syntax: light:theme-name,dark:theme-name. For example: light:rose-pine-dawn,dark:rose-pine. Whitespace around all values are trimmed and order of light and dark does not matter. Both light and dark must be specified in this form. In this form, the theme used will be based on the current desktop environment theme.

There are some known bugs with light/dark mode theming. These will be fixed in a future update:

• macOS: titlebar tabs style is not updated when switching themes.

Background color for the window. Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color.

Foreground color for the window. Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color.

Background image for the terminal.

This should be a path to a PNG or JPEG file, other image formats are not yet supported.

The background image is currently per-terminal, not per-window. If you are a heavy split user, the background image will be repeated across splits. A future improvement to Ghostty will address this.

Warning

Background images are currently duplicated in VRAM per-terminal. For sufficiently large images, this could lead to a large increase in memory usage (specifically VRAM usage). A future Ghostty improvement will resolve this by sharing image textures across terminals.

Available since: 1.2.0

Background image opacity.

This is relative to the value of background-opacity.

A value of 1.0 (the default) will result in the background image being placed on top of the general background color, and then the combined result will be adjusted to the opacity specified by background-opacity.

A value less than 1.0 will result in the background image being mixed with the general background color before the combined result is adjusted to the configured background-opacity.

A value greater than 1.0 will result in the background image having a higher opacity than the general background color. For instance, if the configured background-opacity is 0.5 and background-image-opacity is set to 1.5, then the final opacity of the background image will be 0.5 * 1.5 = 0.75.

Available since: 1.2.0

Background image position.

Valid values are:

• top-left
• top-center
• top-right
• center-left
• center
• center-right
• bottom-left
• bottom-center
• bottom-right

The default value is center.

Available since: 1.2.0

Background image fit.

Valid values are:

• contain

Preserving the aspect ratio, scale the background image to the largest
size that can still be contained within the terminal, so that the whole
image is visible.

• cover

Preserving the aspect ratio, scale the background image to the smallest
size that can completely cover the terminal. This may result in one or
more edges of the image being clipped by the edge of the terminal.

• stretch

Stretch the background image to the full size of the terminal, without
preserving the aspect ratio.

• none

Don't scale the background image.

The default value is contain.

Available since: 1.2.0

Whether to repeat the background image or not.

If this is set to true, the background image will be repeated if there would otherwise be blank space around it because it doesn't completely fill the terminal area.

The default value is false.

Available since: 1.2.0

The foreground and background color for selection. If this is not set, then the selection color is just the inverted window background and foreground (note: not to be confused with the cell bg/fg). Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color. Since version 1.2.0, this can also be set to cell-foreground to match the cell foreground color, or cell-background to match the cell background color.

Whether to clear selected text when typing. This defaults to true. This is typical behavior for most terminal emulators as well as text input fields. If you set this to false, then the selected text will not be cleared when typing.

"Typing" is specifically defined as any non-modifier (shift, control, alt, etc.) keypress that produces data to be sent to the application running within the terminal (e.g. the shell). Additionally, selection is cleared when any preedit or composition state is started (e.g. when typing languages such as Japanese).

If this is false, then the selection can still be manually cleared by clicking once or by pressing escape.

Available since: 1.2.0

The minimum contrast ratio between the foreground and background colors. The contrast ratio is a value between 1 and 21. A value of 1 allows for no contrast (e.g. black on black). This value is the contrast ratio as defined by the WCAG 2.0 specification.

If you want to avoid invisible text (same color as background), a value of 1.1 is a good value. If you want to avoid text that is difficult to read, a value of 3 or higher is a good value. The higher the value, the more likely that text will become black or white.

This value does not apply to Emoji or images.

Color palette for the 256 color form that many terminal applications use. The syntax of this configuration is N=COLOR where N is 0 to 255 (for the 256 colors in the terminal color table) and COLOR is a typical RGB color code such as #AABBCC or AABBCC, or a named X11 color.

The palette index can be in decimal, binary, octal, or hexadecimal. Decimal is assumed unless a prefix is used: 0b for binary, 0o for octal, and 0x for hexadecimal.

For definitions on the color indices and what they canonically map to, see this cheat sheet.

The color of the cursor. If this is not set, a default will be chosen.

Direct colors can be specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color.

Additionally, special values can be used to set the color to match other colors at runtime:

• cell-foreground - Match the cell foreground color. (Available since: 1.2.0)

• cell-background - Match the cell background color. (Available since: 1.2.0)

The opacity level (opposite of transparency) of the cursor. A value of 1 is fully opaque and a value of 0 is fully transparent. A value less than 0 or greater than 1 will be clamped to the nearest valid value. Note that a sufficiently small value such as 0.3 may be effectively invisible and may make it difficult to find the cursor.

The style of the cursor. This sets the default style. A running program can still request an explicit cursor style using escape sequences (such as CSI q). Shell configurations will often request specific cursor styles.

Note that shell integration will automatically set the cursor to a bar at a prompt, regardless of this configuration. You can disable that behavior by specifying shell-integration-features = no-cursor or disabling shell integration entirely.

Valid values are:

• block
• bar
• underline
• block_hollow

Sets the default blinking state of the cursor. This is just the default state; running programs may override the cursor style using DECSCUSR (CSI q).

If this is not set, the cursor blinks by default. Note that this is not the same as a "true" value, as noted below.

If this is not set at all (null), then Ghostty will respect DEC Mode 12 (AT&T cursor blink) as an alternate approach to turning blinking on/off. If this is set to any value other than null, DEC mode 12 will be ignored but DECSCUSR will still be respected.

Valid values are:

• (blank)
• true
• false

The color of the text under the cursor. If this is not set, a default will be chosen. Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color. Since version 1.2.0, this can also be set to cell-foreground to match the cell foreground color, or cell-background to match the cell background color.

Enables the ability to move the cursor at prompts by using alt+click on Linux and option+click on macOS.

This feature requires shell integration (specifically prompt marking via OSC 133) and only works in primary screen mode. Alternate screen applications like vim usually have their own version of this feature but this configuration doesn't control that.

It should be noted that this feature works by translating your desired position into a series of synthetic arrow key movements, so some weird behavior around edge cases are to be expected. This is unfortunately how this feature is implemented across terminals because there isn't any other way to implement it.

Hide the mouse immediately when typing. The mouse becomes visible again when the mouse is used (button, movement, etc.). Platform-specific behavior may dictate other scenarios where the mouse is shown. For example on macOS, the mouse is shown again when a new window, tab, or split is created.

Determines whether running programs can detect the shift key pressed with a mouse click. Typically, the shift key is used to extend mouse selection.

The default value of false means that the shift key is not sent with the mouse protocol and will extend the selection. This value can be conditionally overridden by the running program with the XTSHIFTESCAPE sequence.

The value true means that the shift key is sent with the mouse protocol but the running program can override this behavior with XTSHIFTESCAPE.

The value never is the same as false but the running program cannot override this behavior with XTSHIFTESCAPE. The value always is the same as true but the running program cannot override this behavior with XTSHIFTESCAPE.

If you always want shift to extend mouse selection even if the program requests otherwise, set this to never.

Valid values are:

• true
• false
• always
• never

Multiplier for scrolling distance with the mouse wheel. Any value less than 0.01 or greater than 10,000 will be clamped to the nearest valid value.

A value of "3" (default) scrolls 3 lines per tick.

Available since: 1.2.0

The opacity level (opposite of transparency) of the background. A value of 1 is fully opaque and a value of 0 is fully transparent. A value less than 0 or greater than 1 will be clamped to the nearest valid value.

On macOS, background opacity is disabled when the terminal enters native fullscreen. This is because the background becomes gray and it can cause widgets to show through which isn't generally desirable.

On macOS, changing this configuration requires restarting Ghostty completely.

Whether to blur the background when background-opacity is less than 1.

Valid values are:

• a nonnegative integer specifying the blur intensity
• false, equivalent to a blur intensity of 0
• true, equivalent to the default blur intensity of 20, which is reasonable for a good looking blur. Higher blur intensities may cause strange rendering and performance issues.

Supported on macOS and on some Linux desktop environments, including:

• KDE Plasma (Wayland and X11)

Warning

the exact blur intensity is ignored under KDE Plasma, and setting this setting to either true or any positive blur intensity value would achieve the same effect. The reason is that KWin, the window compositor powering Plasma, only has one global blur setting and does not allow applications to specify individual blur settings.

To configure KWin's global blur setting, open System Settings and go to "Apps & Windows" > "Window Management" > "Desktop Effects" and select the "Blur" plugin. If disabled, enable it by ticking the checkbox to the left. Then click on the "Configure" button and there will be two sliders that allow you to set background blur and noise intensities for all apps, including Ghostty.

All other Linux desktop environments are as of now unsupported. Users may need to set environment-specific settings and/or install third-party plugins in order to support background blur, as there isn't a unified interface for doing so.

The opacity level (opposite of transparency) of an unfocused split. Unfocused splits by default are slightly faded out to make it easier to see which split is focused. To disable this feature, set this value to 1.

A value of 1 is fully opaque and a value of 0 is fully transparent. Because "0" is not useful (it makes the window look very weird), the minimum value is 0.15. This value still looks weird but you can at least see what's going on. A value outside of the range 0.15 to 1 will be clamped to the nearest valid value.

The color to dim the unfocused split. Unfocused splits are dimmed by rendering a semi-transparent rectangle over the split. This sets the color of that rectangle and can be used to carefully control the dimming effect.

This will default to the background color.

Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color.

The color of the split divider. If this is not set, a default will be chosen. Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color.

Available since: 1.1.0

The command to run, usually a shell. If this is not an absolute path, it'll be looked up in the PATH. If this is not set, a default will be looked up from your system. The rules for the default lookup are:

• SHELL environment variable

• passwd entry (user information)

This can contain additional arguments to run the command with. If additional arguments are provided, the command will be executed using /bin/sh -c to offload shell argument expansion.

To avoid shell expansion altogether, prefix the command with direct:, e.g. direct:nvim foo. This will avoid the roundtrip to /bin/sh but will also not support any shell parsing such as arguments with spaces, filepaths with ~, globs, etc. (Available since: 1.2.0)

You can also explicitly prefix the command with shell: to always wrap the command in a shell. This can be used to ensure our heuristics to choose the right mode are not used in case they are wrong. (Available since: 1.2.0)

This command will be used for all new terminal surfaces, i.e. new windows, tabs, etc. If you want to run a command only for the first terminal surface created when Ghostty starts, use the initial-command configuration.

Ghostty supports the common -e flag for executing a command with arguments. For example, ghostty -e fish --with --custom --args. This flag sets the initial-command configuration, see that for more information.

This is the same as "command", but only applies to the first terminal surface created when Ghostty starts. Subsequent terminal surfaces will use the command configuration.

After the first terminal surface is created (or closed), there is no way to run this initial command again automatically. As such, setting this at runtime works but will only affect the next terminal surface if it is the first one ever created.

If you're using the ghostty CLI there is also a shortcut to set this with arguments directly: you can use the -e flag. For example: ghostty -e fish --with --custom --args. The -e flag automatically forces some other behaviors as well:

• Disables shell expansion since the input is expected to already be shell-expanded by the upstream (e.g. the shell used to type in the ghostty -e command).

• gtk-single-instance=false - This ensures that a new instance is launched and the CLI args are respected.

• quit-after-last-window-closed=true - This ensures that the Ghostty process will exit when the command exits. Additionally, the quit-after-last-window-closed-delay is unset.

• shell-integration=detect (if not none) - This prevents forcibly injecting any configured shell integration into the command's environment. With -e its highly unlikely that you're executing a shell and forced shell integration is likely to cause problems (e.g. by wrapping your command in a shell, setting env vars, etc.). This is a safety measure to prevent unexpected behavior. If you want shell integration with a -e-executed command, you must either name your binary appropriately or source the shell integration script manually.

Extra environment variables to pass to commands launched in a terminal surface. The format is env=KEY=VALUE.

env = foo=bar env = bar=baz

Setting env to an empty string will reset the entire map to default (empty).

env =

Setting a key to an empty string will remove that particular key and corresponding value from the map.

env = foo=bar env = foo=

will result in foo not being passed to the launched commands.

Setting a key multiple times will overwrite previous entries.

env = foo=bar env = foo=baz

will result in foo=baz being passed to the launched commands.

These environment variables will override any existing environment variables set by Ghostty. For example, if you set GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR then the value you set here will override the value Ghostty typically automatically injects.

These environment variables will not be passed to commands run by Ghostty for other purposes, like open or xdg-open used to open URLs in your browser.

Available since: 1.2.0

Data to send as input to the command on startup.

The configured command will be launched using the typical rules, then the data specified as this input will be written to the pty before any other input can be provided.

The bytes are sent as-is with no additional encoding. Therefore, be cautious about input that can contain control characters, because this can be used to execute programs in a shell.

The format of this value is:

• raw:<string> - Send raw text as-is. This uses Zig string literal syntax so you can specify control characters and other standard escapes.

• path:<path> - Read a filepath and send the contents. The path must be to a file with finite length. e.g. don't use a device such as /dev/stdin or /dev/urandom as these will block terminal startup indefinitely. Files are limited to 10MB in size to prevent excessive memory usage. If you have files larger than this you should write a script to read the file and send it to the terminal.

If no valid prefix is found, it is assumed to be a raw: input. This is an ergonomic choice to allow you to simply write input = "Hello, world!" (a common case) without needing to prefix every value with raw:.

This can be repeated multiple times to send more data. The data is concatenated directly with no separator characters in between (e.g. no newline).

If any of the input sources do not exist, then none of the input will be sent. Input sources are not verified until the terminal is starting, so missing paths will not show up in config validation.

Changing this configuration at runtime will only affect new terminals.

Available since: 1.2.0

If true, keep the terminal open after the command exits. Normally, the terminal window closes when the running command (such as a shell) exits. With this true, the terminal window will stay open until any keypress is received.

This is primarily useful for scripts or debugging.

The number of milliseconds of runtime below which we consider a process exit to be abnormal. This is used to show an error message when the process exits too quickly.

On Linux, this must be paired with a non-zero exit code. On macOS, we allow any exit code because of the way shell processes are launched via the login command.

The size of the scrollback buffer in bytes. This also includes the active screen. No matter what this is set to, enough memory will always be allocated for the visible screen and anything leftover is the limit for the scrollback.

When this limit is reached, the oldest lines are removed from the scrollback.

Scrollback currently exists completely in memory. This means that the larger this value, the larger potential memory usage. Scrollback is allocated lazily up to this limit, so if you set this to a very large value, it will not immediately consume a lot of memory.

This size is per terminal surface, not for the entire application.

It is not currently possible to set an unlimited scrollback buffer. This is a future planned feature.

This can be changed at runtime but will only affect new terminal surfaces.

Match a regular expression against the terminal text and associate clicking it with an action. This can be used to match URLs, file paths, etc. Actions can be opening using the system opener (e.g. open or xdg-open) or executing any arbitrary binding action.

Links that are configured earlier take precedence over links that are configured later.

A default link that matches a URL and opens it in the system opener always exists. This can be disabled using link-url.

TODO: This can't currently be set!

Enable URL matching. URLs are matched on hover with control (Linux) or command (macOS) pressed and open using the default system application for the linked URL.

The URL matcher is always lowest priority of any configured links (see link). If you want to customize URL matching, use link and disable this.

Show link previews for a matched URL.

When true, link previews are shown for all matched URLs. When false, link previews are never shown. When set to "osc8", link previews are only shown for hyperlinks created with the OSC 8 sequence (in this case, the link text can differ from the link destination).

Available since: 1.2.0

Whether to start the window in a maximized state. This setting applies to new windows and does not apply to tabs, splits, etc. However, this setting will apply to all new windows, not just the first one.

Available since: 1.1.0

Start new windows in fullscreen. This setting applies to new windows and does not apply to tabs, splits, etc. However, this setting will apply to all new windows, not just the first one.

On macOS, this setting does not work if window-decoration is set to "false", because native fullscreen on macOS requires window decorations to be set.

The title Ghostty will use for the window. This will force the title of the window to be this title at all times and Ghostty will ignore any set title escape sequences programs (such as Neovim) may send.

If you want a blank title, set this to one or more spaces by quoting the value. For example, title = " ". This effectively hides the title. This is necessary because setting a blank value resets the title to the default value of the running program.

This configuration can be reloaded at runtime. If it is set, the title will update for all windows. If it is unset, the next title change escape sequence will be honored but previous changes will not retroactively be set. This latter case may require you to restart programs such as Neovim to get the new title.

The setting that will change the application class value.

This controls the class field of the WM_CLASS X11 property (when running under X11), the Wayland application ID (when running under Wayland), and the bus name that Ghostty uses to connect to DBus.

Note that changing this value between invocations will create new, separate instances, of Ghostty when running with gtk-single-instance=true. See that option for more details.

Changing this value may break launching Ghostty from .desktop files, via DBus activation, or systemd user services as the system is expecting Ghostty to connect to DBus using the default class when it is launched.

The class name must follow the requirements defined in the GTK documentation.

The default is com.mitchellh.ghostty.

This only affects GTK builds.

This controls the instance name field of the WM_CLASS X11 property when running under X11. It has no effect otherwise.

The default is ghostty.

This only affects GTK builds.

The directory to change to after starting the command.

This setting is secondary to the window-inherit-working-directory setting. If a previous Ghostty terminal exists in the same process, window-inherit-working-directory will take precedence. Otherwise, this setting will be used. Typically, this setting is used only for the first window.

The default is inherit except in special scenarios listed next. On macOS, if Ghostty can detect it is launched from launchd (double-clicked) or open, then it defaults to home. On Linux with GTK, if Ghostty can detect it was launched from a desktop launcher, then it defaults to home.

The value of this must be an absolute value or one of the special values below:

• home - The home directory of the executing user.

• inherit - The working directory of the launching process.

Key bindings. The format is trigger=action. Duplicate triggers will overwrite previously set values. The list of actions is available in the documentation or using the ghostty +list-actions command.

Trigger: +-separated list of keys and modifiers. Example: ctrl+a, ctrl+shift+b, up.

If the key is a single Unicode codepoint, the trigger will match any presses that produce that codepoint. These are impacted by keyboard layouts. For example, a will match the a key on a QWERTY keyboard, but will match the q key on a AZERTY keyboard (assuming US physical layout).

For Unicode codepoints, matching is done by comparing the set of modifiers with the unmodified codepoint. The unmodified codepoint is sometimes called an "unshifted character" in other software, but all modifiers are considered, not only shift. For example, ctrl+a will match a but not ctrl+shift+a (which is A on a US keyboard).

Further, codepoint matching is case-insensitive and the unmodified codepoint is always case folded for comparison. As a result, ctrl+A configured will match when ctrl+a is pressed. Note that this means some key combinations are impossible depending on keyboard layout. For example, ctrl+_ is impossible on a US keyboard because _ is shift+- and ctrl+shift+- is not equal to ctrl+_ (because the modifiers don't match!). More details on impossible key combinations can be found at this excellent source written by Qt developers: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qkeysequence.html#keyboard-layout-issues

Physical key codes can be specified by using any of the key codes as specified by the W3C specification. For example, KeyA will match the physical a key on a US standard keyboard regardless of the keyboard layout. These are case-sensitive.

For aesthetic reasons, the w3c codes also support snake case. For example, key_a is equivalent to KeyA. The only exceptions are function keys, e.g. F1 is f1 (no underscore). This is a consequence of our internal code using snake case but is purposely supported and tested so it is safe to use. It allows an all-lowercase binding which I find more aesthetically pleasing.

Function keys such as insert, up, f5, etc. are also specified using the keys as specified by the previously linked W3C specification.

Physical keys always match with a higher priority than Unicode codepoints, so if you specify both a and KeyA, the physical key will always be used regardless of what order they are configured.

Valid modifiers are shift, ctrl (alias: control), alt (alias: opt, option), and super (alias: cmd, command). You may use the modifier or the alias. When debugging keybinds, the non-aliased modifier will always be used in output.

Note

The fn or "globe" key on keyboards are not supported as a modifier. This is a limitation of the operating systems and GUI toolkits that Ghostty uses.

Some additional notes for triggers:

• modifiers cannot repeat, ctrl+ctrl+a is invalid.

• modifiers and keys can be in any order, shift+a+ctrl is weird, but valid.

• only a single key input is allowed, ctrl+a+b is invalid.

You may also specify multiple triggers separated by > to require a sequence of triggers to activate the action. For example, ctrl+a>n=new_window will only trigger the new_window action if the user presses ctrl+a followed separately by n. In other software, this is sometimes called a leader key, a key chord, a key table, etc. There is no hardcoded limit on the number of parts in a sequence.

Warning

If you define a sequence as a CLI argument to ghostty, you probably have to quote the keybind since > is a special character in most shells. Example: ghostty --keybind='ctrl+a>n=new_window'

A trigger sequence has some special handling:

• Ghostty will wait an indefinite amount of time for the next key in the sequence. There is no way to specify a timeout. The only way to force the output of a prefix key is to assign another keybind to specifically output that key (e.g. ctrl+a>ctrl+a=text:foo) or press an unbound key which will send both keys to the program.

• If a prefix in a sequence is previously bound, the sequence will override the previous binding. For example, if ctrl+a is bound to new_window and ctrl+a>n is bound to new_tab, pressing ctrl+a will do nothing.

• Adding to the above, if a previously bound sequence prefix is used in a new, non-sequence binding, the entire previously bound sequence will be unbound. For example, if you bind ctrl+a>n and ctrl+a>t, and then bind ctrl+a directly, both ctrl+a>n and ctrl+a>t will become unbound.

• Trigger sequences are not allowed for global: or all:-prefixed triggers. This is a limitation we could remove in the future.

Action is the action to take when the trigger is satisfied. It takes the format action or action:param. The latter form is only valid if the action requires a parameter.

• ignore - Do nothing, ignore the key input. This can be used to black hole certain inputs to have no effect.

• unbind - Remove the binding. This makes it so the previous action is removed, and the key will be sent through to the child command if it is printable. Unbind will remove any matching trigger, including physical:-prefixed triggers without specifying the prefix.

• csi:text - Send a CSI sequence. e.g. csi:A sends "cursor up".

• esc:text - Send an escape sequence. e.g. esc:d deletes to the end of the word to the right.

• text:text - Send a string. Uses Zig string literal syntax. e.g. text:\x15 sends Ctrl-U.

• All other actions can be found in the documentation or by using the ghostty +list-actions command.

Some notes for the action:

• The parameter is taken as-is after the :. Double quotes or other mechanisms are included and NOT parsed. If you want to send a string value that includes spaces, wrap the entire trigger/action in double quotes. Example: --keybind="up=csi:A B"

There are some additional special values that can be specified for keybind:

• keybind=clear will clear all set keybindings. Warning: this removes ALL keybindings up to this point, including the default keybindings.

The keybind trigger can be prefixed with some special values to change the behavior of the keybind. These are:

• all: - Make the keybind apply to all terminal surfaces. By default, keybinds only apply to the focused terminal surface. If this is true, then the keybind will be sent to all terminal surfaces. This only applies to actions that are surface-specific. For actions that are already global (e.g. quit), this prefix has no effect.

Available since: 1.0.0

• global: - Make the keybind global. By default, keybinds only work within Ghostty and under the right conditions (application focused, sometimes terminal focused, etc.). If you want a keybind to work globally across your system (e.g. even when Ghostty is not focused), specify this prefix. This prefix implies all:. Note: this does not work in all environments; see the additional notes below for more information.

Available since: 1.0.0 (on macOS)
Available since: 1.2.0 (on GTK)

• unconsumed: - Do not consume the input. By default, a keybind will consume the input, meaning that the associated encoding (if any) will not be sent to the running program in the terminal. If you wish to send the encoded value to the program, specify the unconsumed: prefix before the entire keybind. For example: unconsumed:ctrl+a=reload_config. global: and all:-prefixed keybinds will always consume the input regardless of this setting. Since they are not associated with a specific terminal surface, they're never encoded.

Available since: 1.0.0

• performable: - Only consume the input if the action is able to be performed. For example, the copy_to_clipboard action will only consume the input if there is a selection to copy. If there is no selection, Ghostty behaves as if the keybind was not set. This has no effect with global: or all:-prefixed keybinds. For key sequences, this will reset the sequence if the action is not performable (acting identically to not having a keybind set at all).

Performable keybinds will not appear as menu shortcuts in the
application menu. This is because the menu shortcuts force the
action to be performed regardless of the state of the terminal.
Performable keybinds will still work, they just won't appear as
a shortcut label in the menu.

Available since: 1.1.0

Keybind triggers are not unique per prefix combination. For example, ctrl+a and global:ctrl+a are not two separate keybinds. The keybind set later will overwrite the keybind set earlier. In this case, the global: keybind will be used.

Multiple prefixes can be specified. For example, global:unconsumed:ctrl+a=reload_config will make the keybind global and not consume the input to reload the config.

Note

global: is only supported on macOS and certain Linux platforms.

On macOS, this feature requires accessibility permissions to be granted to Ghostty. When a global: keybind is specified and Ghostty is launched or reloaded, Ghostty will attempt to request these permissions. If the permissions are not granted, the keybind will not work. On macOS, you can find these permissions in System Preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Accessibility.

On Linux, you need a desktop environment that implements the Global Shortcuts protocol as a part of its XDG desktop protocol implementation. Desktop environments that are known to support (or not support) global shortcuts include:

• Users using KDE Plasma (since 5.27) and GNOME (since 48) should be able to use global shortcuts with little to no configuration.

• Some manual configuration is required on Hyprland. Consult the steps outlined on the Hyprland Wiki to set up global shortcuts correctly. (Important: xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland must also be installed!)

• Notably, global shortcuts have not been implemented on wlroots-based compositors like Sway (see upstream issue).

Horizontal window padding. This applies padding between the terminal cells and the left and right window borders. The value is in points, meaning that it will be scaled appropriately for screen DPI.

If this value is set too large, the screen will render nothing, because the grid will be completely squished by the padding. It is up to you as the user to pick a reasonable value. If you pick an unreasonable value, a warning will appear in the logs.

Changing this configuration at runtime will only affect new terminals, i.e. new windows, tabs, etc.

To set a different left and right padding, specify two numerical values separated by a comma. For example, window-padding-x = 2,4 will set the left padding to 2 and the right padding to 4. If you want to set both paddings to the same value, you can use a single value. For example, window-padding-x = 2 will set both paddings to 2.

Vertical window padding. This applies padding between the terminal cells and the top and bottom window borders. The value is in points, meaning that it will be scaled appropriately for screen DPI.

If this value is set too large, the screen will render nothing, because the grid will be completely squished by the padding. It is up to you as the user to pick a reasonable value. If you pick an unreasonable value, a warning will appear in the logs.

Changing this configuration at runtime will only affect new terminals, i.e. new windows, tabs, etc.

To set a different top and bottom padding, specify two numerical values separated by a comma. For example, window-padding-y = 2,4 will set the top padding to 2 and the bottom padding to 4. If you want to set both paddings to the same value, you can use a single value. For example, window-padding-y = 2 will set both paddings to 2.

The viewport dimensions are usually not perfectly divisible by the cell size. In this case, some extra padding on the end of a column and the bottom of the final row may exist. If this is true, then this extra padding is automatically balanced between all four edges to minimize imbalance on one side. If this is false, the top left grid cell will always hug the edge with zero padding other than what may be specified with the other window-padding options.

If other window-padding fields are set and this is true, this will still apply. The other padding is applied first and may affect how many grid cells actually exist, and this is applied last in order to balance the padding given a certain viewport size and grid cell size.

The color of the padding area of the window. Valid values are:

• background - The background color specified in background.
• extend - Extend the background color of the nearest grid cell.
• extend-always - Same as "extend" but always extends without applying any of the heuristics that disable extending noted below.

The "extend" value will be disabled in certain scenarios. On primary screen applications (e.g. not something like Neovim), the color will not be extended vertically if any of the following are true:

• The nearest row has any cells that have the default background color. The thinking is that in this case, the default background color looks fine as a padding color.
• The nearest row is a prompt row (requires shell integration). The thinking here is that prompts often contain powerline glyphs that do not look good extended.
• The nearest row contains a perfect fit powerline character. These don't look good extended.

Synchronize rendering with the screen refresh rate. If true, this will minimize tearing and align redraws with the screen but may cause input latency. If false, this will maximize redraw frequency but may cause tearing, and under heavy load may use more CPU and power.

This defaults to true because out-of-sync rendering on macOS can cause kernel panics (macOS 14.4+) and performance issues for external displays over some hardware such as DisplayLink. If you want to minimize input latency, set this to false with the known aforementioned risks.

Changing this value at runtime will only affect new terminals.

This setting is only supported currently on macOS.

If true, new windows and tabs will inherit the working directory of the previously focused window. If no window was previously focused, the default working directory will be used (the working-directory option).

If true, new windows and tabs will inherit the font size of the previously focused window. If no window was previously focused, the default font size will be used. If this is false, the default font size specified in the configuration font-size will be used.

Configure a preference for window decorations. This setting specifies a preference; the actual OS, desktop environment, window manager, etc. may override this preference. Ghostty will do its best to respect this preference but it may not always be possible.

Valid values:

• none - All window decorations will be disabled. Titlebar, borders, etc. will not be shown. On macOS, this will also disable tabs (enforced by the system).

• auto - Automatically decide to use either client-side or server-side decorations based on the detected preferences of the current OS and desktop environment. This option usually makes Ghostty look the most "native" for your desktop.

• client - Prefer client-side decorations.

Available since: 1.1.0

• server - Prefer server-side decorations. This is only relevant on Linux with GTK, either on X11, or Wayland on a compositor that supports the org_kde_kwin_server_decoration protocol (e.g. KDE Plasma, but almost any non-GNOME desktop supports this protocol).

If `server` is set but the environment doesn't support server-side
decorations, client-side decorations will be used instead.

Available since: 1.1.0

The default value is auto.

For the sake of backwards compatibility and convenience, this setting also accepts boolean true and false values. If set to true, this is equivalent to auto. If set to false, this is equivalent to none. This is convenient for users who live primarily on systems that don't differentiate between client and server-side decorations (e.g. macOS and Windows).

The "toggle_window_decorations" keybind action can be used to create a keybinding to toggle this setting at runtime.

macOS: To hide the titlebar without removing the native window borders or rounded corners, use macos-titlebar-style = hidden instead.

The font that will be used for the application's window and tab titles.

If this setting is left unset, the system default font will be used.

Note

any font available on the system may be used, this font is not required to be a fixed-width font.

Available since: 1.1.0 (on GTK)

The text that will be displayed in the subtitle of the window. Valid values:

• false - Disable the subtitle.
• working-directory - Set the subtitle to the working directory of the surface.

This feature is only supported on GTK.

Available since: 1.1.0

The theme to use for the windows. Valid values:

• auto - Determine the theme based on the configured terminal background color. This has no effect if the "theme" configuration has separate light and dark themes. In that case, the behavior of "auto" is equivalent to "system".
• system - Use the system theme.
• light - Use the light theme regardless of system theme.
• dark - Use the dark theme regardless of system theme.
• ghostty - Use the background and foreground colors specified in the Ghostty configuration. This is only supported on Linux builds.

On macOS, if macos-titlebar-style is "tabs", the window theme will be automatically set based on the luminosity of the terminal background color. This only applies to terminal windows. This setting will still apply to non-terminal windows within Ghostty.

This is currently only supported on macOS and Linux.

The color space to use when interpreting terminal colors. "Terminal colors" refers to colors specified in your configuration and colors produced by direct-color SGR sequences.

Valid values:

• srgb - Interpret colors in the sRGB color space. This is the default.
• display-p3 - Interpret colors in the Display P3 color space.

This setting is currently only supported on macOS.

The initial window size. This size is in terminal grid cells by default. Both values must be set to take effect. If only one value is set, it is ignored.

We don't currently support specifying a size in pixels but a future change can enable that. If this isn't specified, the app runtime will determine some default size.

Note that the window manager may put limits on the size or override the size. For example, a tiling window manager may force the window to be a certain size to fit within the grid. There is nothing Ghostty will do about this, but it will make an effort.

Sizes larger than the screen size will be clamped to the screen size. This can be used to create a maximized-by-default window size.

This will not affect new tabs, splits, or other nested terminal elements. This only affects the initial window size of any new window. Changing this value will not affect the size of the window after it has been created. This is only used for the initial size.

BUG: On Linux with GTK, the calculated window size will not properly take into account window decorations. As a result, the grid dimensions will not exactly match this configuration. If window decorations are disabled (see window-decoration), then this will work as expected.

Windows smaller than 10 wide by 4 high are not allowed.

The starting window position. This position is in pixels and is relative to the top-left corner of the primary monitor. Both values must be set to take effect. If only one value is set, it is ignored.

Note that the window manager may put limits on the position or override the position. For example, a tiling window manager may force the window to be a certain position to fit within the grid. There is nothing Ghostty will do about this, but it will make an effort.

Also note that negative values are also up to the operating system and window manager. Some window managers may not allow windows to be placed off-screen.

Invalid positions are runtime-specific, but generally the positions are clamped to the nearest valid position.

On macOS, the window position is relative to the top-left corner of the visible screen area. This means that if the menu bar is visible, the window will be placed below the menu bar.

Note

this is only supported on macOS. The GTK runtime does not support setting the window position, as windows are only allowed position themselves in X11 and not Wayland.

Whether to enable saving and restoring window state. Window state includes their position, size, tabs, splits, etc. Some window state requires shell integration, such as preserving working directories. See shell-integration for more information.

There are three valid values for this configuration:

• default will use the default system behavior. On macOS, this will only save state if the application is forcibly terminated or if it is configured systemwide via Settings.app.

• never will never save window state.

• always will always save window state whenever Ghostty is exited.

If you change this value to never while Ghostty is not running, the next Ghostty launch will NOT restore the window state.

If you change this value to default while Ghostty is not running and the previous exit saved state, the next Ghostty launch will still restore the window state. This is because Ghostty cannot know if the previous exit was due to a forced save or not (macOS doesn't provide this information).

If you change this value so that window state is saved while Ghostty is not running, the previous window state will not be restored because Ghostty only saves state on exit if this is enabled.

The default value is default.

This is currently only supported on macOS. This has no effect on Linux.

Resize the window in discrete increments of the focused surface's cell size. If this is disabled, surfaces are resized in pixel increments. Currently only supported on macOS.

The position where new tabs are created. Valid values:

• current - Insert the new tab after the currently focused tab, or at the end if there are no focused tabs.

• end - Insert the new tab at the end of the tab list.

Whether to show the tab bar.

Valid values:

• always

  Always display the tab bar, even when there's only one tab.

  Available since: 1.2.0

• auto (default)

  Automatically show and hide the tab bar. The tab bar is only shown when there are two or more tabs present.

• never

  Never show the tab bar. Tabs are only accessible via the tab overview or by keybind actions.

Currently only supported on Linux (GTK).

Background color for the window titlebar. This only takes effect if window-theme is set to ghostty. Currently only supported in the GTK app runtime.

Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color.

Foreground color for the window titlebar. This only takes effect if window-theme is set to ghostty. Currently only supported in the GTK app runtime.

Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color.

This controls when resize overlays are shown. Resize overlays are a transient popup that shows the size of the terminal while the surfaces are being resized. The possible options are:

• always - Always show resize overlays.
• never - Never show resize overlays.
• after-first - The resize overlay will not appear when the surface is first created, but will show up if the surface is subsequently resized.

The default is after-first.

If resize overlays are enabled, this controls the position of the overlay. The possible options are:

• center
• top-left
• top-center
• top-right
• bottom-left
• bottom-center
• bottom-right

The default is center.

If resize overlays are enabled, this controls how long the overlay is visible on the screen before it is hidden. The default is ¾ of a second or 750 ms.

The duration is specified as a series of numbers followed by time units. Whitespace is allowed between numbers and units. Each number and unit will be added together to form the total duration.

The allowed time units are as follows:

• y - 365 SI days, or 8760 hours, or 31536000 seconds. No adjustments are made for leap years or leap seconds.
• d - one SI day, or 86400 seconds.
• h - one hour, or 3600 seconds.
• m - one minute, or 60 seconds.
• s - one second.
• ms - one millisecond, or 0.001 second.
• us or µs - one microsecond, or 0.000001 second.
• ns - one nanosecond, or 0.000000001 second.

Examples:

• 1h30m
• 45s

Units can be repeated and will be added together. This means that 1h1h is equivalent to 2h. This is confusing and should be avoided. A future update may disallow this.

The maximum value is 584y 49w 23h 34m 33s 709ms 551µs 615ns. Any value larger than this will be clamped to the maximum value.

Available since 1.0.0

If true, when there are multiple split panes, the mouse selects the pane that is focused. This only applies to the currently focused window; e.g. mousing over a split in an unfocused window will not focus that split and bring the window to front.

Default is false.

Whether to allow programs running in the terminal to read/write to the system clipboard (OSC 52, for googling). The default is to allow clipboard reading after prompting the user and allow writing unconditionally.

Valid values are:

• ask
• allow
• deny

Trims trailing whitespace on data that is copied to the clipboard. This does not affect data sent to the clipboard via clipboard-write.

Require confirmation before pasting text that appears unsafe. This helps prevent a "copy/paste attack" where a user may accidentally execute unsafe commands by pasting text with newlines.

If true, bracketed pastes will be considered safe. By default, bracketed pastes are considered safe. "Bracketed" pastes are pastes while the running program has bracketed paste mode enabled (a setting set by the running program, not the terminal emulator).

Enables or disabled title reporting (CSI 21 t). This escape sequence allows the running program to query the terminal title. This is a common security issue and is disabled by default.

Warning

This can expose sensitive information at best and enable arbitrary code execution at worst (with a maliciously crafted title and a minor amount of user interaction).

Available since: 1.0.1

The total amount of bytes that can be used for image data (e.g. the Kitty image protocol) per terminal screen. The maximum value is 4,294,967,295 (4GiB). The default is 320MB. If this is set to zero, then all image protocols will be disabled.

This value is separate for primary and alternate screens so the effective limit per surface is double.

Whether to automatically copy selected text to the clipboard. true will prefer to copy to the selection clipboard, otherwise it will copy to the system clipboard.

The value clipboard will always copy text to the selection clipboard as well as the system clipboard.

Middle-click paste will always use the selection clipboard. Middle-click paste is always enabled even if this is false.

The default value is true on Linux and macOS.

The time in milliseconds between clicks to consider a click a repeat (double, triple, etc.) or an entirely new single click. A value of zero will use a platform-specific default. The default on macOS is determined by the OS settings. On every other platform it is 500ms.

Additional configuration files to read. This configuration can be repeated to read multiple configuration files. Configuration files themselves can load more configuration files. Paths are relative to the file containing the config-file directive. For command-line arguments, paths are relative to the current working directory.

Prepend a ? character to the file path to suppress errors if the file does not exist. If you want to include a file that begins with a literal ? character, surround the file path in double quotes (").

Cycles are not allowed. If a cycle is detected, an error will be logged and the configuration file will be ignored.

Configuration files are loaded after the configuration they're defined within in the order they're defined. THIS IS A VERY SUBTLE BUT IMPORTANT POINT. To put it another way: configuration files do not take effect until after the entire configuration is loaded. For example, in the configuration below:

config-file = "foo"
a = 1

If "foo" contains a = 2, the final value of a will be 2, because foo is loaded after the configuration file that configures the nested config-file value.

When this is true, the default configuration file paths will be loaded. The default configuration file paths are currently only the XDG config path ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ghostty/config).

If this is false, the default configuration paths will not be loaded. This is targeted directly at using Ghostty from the CLI in a way that minimizes external effects.

This is a CLI-only configuration. Setting this in a configuration file will have no effect. It is not an error, but it will not do anything. This configuration can only be set via CLI arguments.

Confirms that a surface should be closed before closing it.

This defaults to true. If set to false, surfaces will close without any confirmation. This can also be set to always, which will always confirm closing a surface, even if shell integration says a process isn't running.

Whether or not to quit after the last surface is closed.

This defaults to false on macOS since that is standard behavior for a macOS application. On Linux, this defaults to true since that is generally expected behavior.

On Linux, if this is true, Ghostty can delay quitting fully until a configurable amount of time has passed after the last window is closed. See the documentation of quit-after-last-window-closed-delay.

Controls how long Ghostty will stay running after the last open surface has been closed. This only has an effect if quit-after-last-window-closed is also set to true.

The minimum value for this configuration is 1s. Any values lower than this will be clamped to 1s.

The duration is specified as a series of numbers followed by time units. Whitespace is allowed between numbers and units. Each number and unit will be added together to form the total duration.

The allowed time units are as follows:

• y - 365 SI days, or 8760 hours, or 31536000 seconds. No adjustments are made for leap years or leap seconds.
• d - one SI day, or 86400 seconds.
• h - one hour, or 3600 seconds.
• m - one minute, or 60 seconds.
• s - one second.
• ms - one millisecond, or 0.001 second.
• us or µs - one microsecond, or 0.000001 second.
• ns - one nanosecond, or 0.000000001 second.

Examples:

• 1h30m
• 45s

Units can be repeated and will be added together. This means that 1h1h is equivalent to 2h. This is confusing and should be avoided. A future update may disallow this.

The maximum value is 584y 49w 23h 34m 33s 709ms 551µs 615ns. Any value larger than this will be clamped to the maximum value.

By default quit-after-last-window-closed-delay is unset and Ghostty will quit immediately after the last window is closed if quit-after-last-window-closed is true.

Only implemented on Linux.

This controls whether an initial window is created when Ghostty is run. Note that if quit-after-last-window-closed is true and quit-after-last-window-closed-delay is set, setting initial-window to false will mean that Ghostty will quit after the configured delay if no window is ever created. Only implemented on Linux and macOS.

The duration that undo operations remain available. After this time, the operation will be removed from the undo stack and cannot be undone.

The default value is 5 seconds.

This timeout applies per operation, meaning that if you perform multiple operations, each operation will have its own timeout. New operations do not reset the timeout of previous operations.

A timeout of zero will effectively disable undo operations. It is not possible to set an infinite timeout, but you can set a very large timeout to effectively disable the timeout (on the order of years). This is highly discouraged, as it will cause the undo stack to grow indefinitely, memory usage to grow unbounded, and terminal sessions to never actually quit.

The duration is specified as a series of numbers followed by time units. Whitespace is allowed between numbers and units. Each number and unit will be added together to form the total duration.

The allowed time units are as follows:

• y - 365 SI days, or 8760 hours, or 31536000 seconds. No adjustments are made for leap years or leap seconds.
• d - one SI day, or 86400 seconds.
• h - one hour, or 3600 seconds.
• m - one minute, or 60 seconds.
• s - one second.
• ms - one millisecond, or 0.001 second.
• us or µs - one microsecond, or 0.000001 second.
• ns - one nanosecond, or 0.000000001 second.

Examples:

• 1h30m
• 45s

Units can be repeated and will be added together. This means that 1h1h is equivalent to 2h. This is confusing and should be avoided. A future update may disallow this.

This configuration is only supported on macOS. Linux doesn't support undo operations at all so this configuration has no effect.

Available since: 1.2.0

The position of the "quick" terminal window. To learn more about the quick terminal, see the documentation for the toggle_quick_terminal binding action.

Valid values are:

• top - Terminal appears at the top of the screen.
• bottom - Terminal appears at the bottom of the screen.
• left - Terminal appears at the left of the screen.
• right - Terminal appears at the right of the screen.
• center - Terminal appears at the center of the screen.

On macOS, changing this configuration requires restarting Ghostty completely.

Note

There is no default keybind for toggling the quick terminal. To enable this feature, bind the toggle_quick_terminal action to a key.

The size of the quick terminal.

The size can be specified either as a percentage of the screen dimensions (height/width), or as an absolute size in pixels. Percentage values are suffixed with % (e.g. 20%) while pixel values are suffixed with px (e.g. 300px). A bare value without a suffix is a config error.

When only one size is specified, the size parameter affects the size of the quick terminal on its primary axis, which depends on its position: height for quick terminals placed on the top or bottom, and width for left or right. The primary axis of a centered quick terminal depends on the monitor's orientation: height when on a landscape monitor, and width when on a portrait monitor.

The secondary axis would be maximized for non-center positioned quick terminals unless another size parameter is specified, separated from the first by a comma (,). Percentage and pixel sizes can be mixed together: for instance, a size of 50%,500px for a top-positioned quick terminal would be half a screen tall, and 500 pixels wide.

The screen where the quick terminal should show up.

Valid values are:

• main - The screen that the operating system recommends as the main screen. On macOS, this is the screen that is currently receiving keyboard input. This screen is defined by the operating system and not chosen by Ghostty.

• mouse - The screen that the mouse is currently hovered over.

• macos-menu-bar - The screen that contains the macOS menu bar as set in the display settings on macOS. This is a bit confusing because every screen on macOS has a menu bar, but this is the screen that contains the primary menu bar.

The default value is main because this is the recommended screen by the operating system.

Only implemented on macOS.

Duration (in seconds) of the quick terminal enter and exit animation. Set it to 0 to disable animation completely. This can be changed at runtime.

Only implemented on macOS.

Automatically hide the quick terminal when focus shifts to another window. Set it to false for the quick terminal to remain open even when it loses focus.

Defaults to true on macOS and on false on Linux/BSD. This is because global shortcuts on Linux require system configuration and are considerably less accessible than on macOS, meaning that it is more preferable to keep the quick terminal open until the user has completed their task. This default may change in the future.

This configuration option determines the behavior of the quick terminal when switching between macOS spaces. macOS spaces are virtual desktops that can be manually created or are automatically created when an application is in full-screen mode.

Valid values are:

• move - When switching to another space, the quick terminal will also moved to the current space.

• remain - The quick terminal will stay only in the space where it was originally opened and will not follow when switching to another space.

The default value is move.

Only implemented on macOS. On Linux the behavior is always equivalent to move.

Available since: 1.1.0

Determines under which circumstances that the quick terminal should receive keyboard input. See the corresponding Wayland documentation for a more detailed explanation of the behavior of each option.

Note

The exact behavior of each option may differ significantly across compositors -- experiment with them on your system to find one that suits your liking!

Valid values are:

• none

  The quick terminal will not receive any keyboard input.

• on-demand (default)

  The quick terminal would only receive keyboard input when it is focused.

• exclusive

  The quick terminal will always receive keyboard input, even when another window is currently focused.

Only has an effect on Linux Wayland. On macOS the behavior is always equivalent to on-demand.

Available since: 1.2.0

Whether to enable shell integration auto-injection or not. Shell integration greatly enhances the terminal experience by enabling a number of features:

• Working directory reporting so new tabs, splits inherit the previous terminal's working directory.

• Prompt marking that enables the "jump_to_prompt" keybinding.

• If you're sitting at a prompt, closing a terminal will not ask for confirmation.

• Resizing the window with a complex prompt usually paints much better.

Allowable values are:

• none - Do not do any automatic injection. You can still manually configure your shell to enable the integration.

• detect - Detect the shell based on the filename.

• bash, elvish, fish, zsh - Use this specific shell injection scheme.

The default value is detect.

Shell integration features to enable. These require our shell integration to be loaded, either automatically via shell-integration or manually.

The format of this is a list of features to enable separated by commas. If you prefix a feature with no- then it is disabled. If you omit a feature, its default value is used, so you must explicitly disable features you don't want. You can also use true or false to turn all features on or off.

Example: cursor, no-cursor, sudo, no-sudo, title, no-title

Available features:

• cursor - Set the cursor to a blinking bar at the prompt.

• sudo - Set sudo wrapper to preserve terminfo.

• title - Set the window title via shell integration.

• ssh-env - Enable SSH environment variable compatibility. Automatically converts TERM from xterm-ghostty to xterm-256color when connecting to remote hosts and propagates COLORTERM, TERM_PROGRAM, and TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION. Whether or not these variables will be accepted by the remote host(s) will depend on whether or not the variables are allowed in their sshd_config. (Available since: 1.2.0)

• ssh-terminfo - Enable automatic terminfo installation on remote hosts. Attempts to install Ghostty's terminfo entry using infocmp and tic when connecting to hosts that lack it. Requires infocmp to be available locally and tic to be available on remote hosts. Once terminfo is installed on a remote host, it will be automatically "cached" to avoid repeat installations. If desired, the +ssh-cache CLI action can be used to manage the installation cache manually using various arguments. (Available since: 1.2.0)

SSH features work independently and can be combined for optimal experience: when both ssh-env and ssh-terminfo are enabled, Ghostty will install its terminfo on remote hosts and use xterm-ghostty as TERM, falling back to xterm-256color with environment variables if terminfo installation fails.

Custom entries into the command palette.

Each entry requires the title, the corresponding action, and an optional description. Each field should be prefixed with the field name, a colon (:), and then the specified value. The syntax for actions is identical to the one for keybind actions. Whitespace in between fields is ignored.

command-palette-entry = title:Reset Font Style, action:csi:0m
command-palette-entry = title:Crash on Main Thread,description:Causes a crash on the main (UI) thread.,action:crash:main

By default, the command palette is preloaded with most actions that might be useful in an interactive setting yet do not have easily accessible or memorizable shortcuts. The default entries can be cleared by setting this setting to an empty value:

command-palette-entry =

Available since: 1.2.0

Sets the reporting format for OSC sequences that request color information. Ghostty currently supports OSC 10 (foreground), OSC 11 (background), and OSC 4 (256 color palette) queries, and by default the reported values are scaled-up RGB values, where each component are 16 bits. This is how most terminals report these values. However, some legacy applications may require 8-bit, unscaled, components. We also support turning off reporting altogether. The components are lowercase hex values.

Allowable values are:

• none - OSC 4/10/11 queries receive no reply

• 8-bit - Color components are return unscaled, e.g. rr/gg/bb

• 16-bit - Color components are returned scaled, e.g. rrrr/gggg/bbbb

The default value is 16-bit.

If true, allows the "KAM" mode (ANSI mode 2) to be used within the terminal. KAM disables keyboard input at the request of the application. This is not a common feature and is not recommended to be enabled. This will not be documented further because if you know you need KAM, you know. If you don't know if you need KAM, you don't need it.

Custom shaders to run after the default shaders. This is a file path to a GLSL-syntax shader for all platforms.

Warning

Invalid shaders can cause Ghostty to become unusable such as by causing the window to be completely black. If this happens, you can unset this configuration to disable the shader.

Custom shader support is based on and compatible with the Shadertoy shaders. Shaders should specify a mainImage function and the available uniforms largely match Shadertoy, with some caveats and Ghostty-specific extensions.

The uniform values available to shaders are as follows:

• sampler2D iChannel0 - Input texture.

A texture containing the current terminal screen. If multiple custom
shaders are specified, the output of previous shaders is written to
this texture, to allow combining multiple effects.

• vec3 iResolution - Output texture size, [width, height, 1] (in px).

• float iTime - Time in seconds since first frame was rendered.

• float iTimeDelta - Time in seconds since previous frame was rendered.

• float iFrameRate - Average framerate. (NOT CURRENTLY SUPPORTED)

• int iFrame - Number of frames that have been rendered so far.

• float iChannelTime[4] - Current time for video or sound input. (N/A)

• vec3 iChannelResolution[4] - Resolutions of the 4 input samplers.

  Currently only iChannel0 exists, and iChannelResolution[0] is identical to iResolution.

• vec4 iMouse - Mouse input info. (NOT CURRENTLY SUPPORTED)

• vec4 iDate - Date/time info. (NOT CURRENTLY SUPPORTED)

• float iSampleRate - Sample rate for audio. (N/A)

Ghostty-specific extensions:

• vec4 iCurrentCursor - Info about the terminal cursor.

  • iCurrentCursor.xy is the -X, +Y corner of the current cursor.
  • iCurrentCursor.zw is the width and height of the current cursor.

• vec4 iPreviousCursor - Info about the previous terminal cursor.

• vec4 iCurrentCursorColor - Color of the terminal cursor.

• vec4 iPreviousCursorColor - Color of the previous terminal cursor.

• float iTimeCursorChange - Timestamp of terminal cursor change.

  When the terminal cursor changes position or color, this is set to the same time as the iTime uniform, allowing you to compute the time since the change by subtracting this from iTime.

If the shader fails to compile, the shader will be ignored. Any errors related to shader compilation will not show up as configuration errors and only show up in the log, since shader compilation happens after configuration loading on the dedicated render thread. For interactive development, use shadertoy.com.

This can be repeated multiple times to load multiple shaders. The shaders will be run in the order they are specified.

This can be changed at runtime and will affect all open terminals.

If true (default), the focused terminal surface will run an animation loop when custom shaders are used. This uses slightly more CPU (generally less than 10%) but allows the shader to animate. This only runs if there are custom shaders and the terminal is focused.

If this is set to false, the terminal and custom shader will only render when the terminal is updated. This is more efficient but the shader will not animate.

This can also be set to always, which will always run the animation loop regardless of whether the terminal is focused or not. The animation loop will still only run when custom shaders are used. Note that this will use more CPU per terminal surface and can become quite expensive depending on the shader and your terminal usage.

This can be changed at runtime and will affect all open terminals.

Bell features to enable if bell support is available in your runtime. Not all features are available on all runtimes. The format of this is a list of features to enable separated by commas. If you prefix a feature with no- then it is disabled. If you omit a feature, its default value is used.

Valid values are:

• system

  Instruct the system to notify the user using built-in system functions. This could result in an audiovisual effect, a notification, or something else entirely. Changing these effects require altering system settings: for instance under the "Sound > Alert Sound" setting in GNOME, or the "Accessibility > System Bell" settings in KDE Plasma. (GTK only)

• audio

  Play a custom sound. (GTK only)

• attention (enabled by default)

  Request the user's attention when Ghostty is unfocused, until it has received focus again. On macOS, this will bounce the app icon in the dock once. On Linux, the behavior depends on the desktop environment and/or the window manager/compositor:

  • On KDE, the background of the desktop icon in the task bar would be highlighted;

  • On GNOME, you may receive a notification that, when clicked, would bring the Ghostty window into focus;

  • On Sway, the window may be decorated with a distinctly colored border;

  • On other systems this may have no effect at all.

• title (enabled by default)

  Prepend a bell emoji (🔔) to the title of the alerted surface until the terminal is re-focused or interacted with (such as on keyboard input).

  Only implemented on macOS.

Example: audio, no-audio, system, no-system

Available since: 1.2.0

If audio is an enabled bell feature, this is a path to an audio file. If the path is not absolute, it is considered relative to the directory of the configuration file that it is referenced from, or from the current working directory if this is used as a CLI flag. The path may be prefixed with ~/ to reference the user's home directory. (GTK only)

Available since: 1.2.0

If audio is an enabled bell feature, this is the volume to play the audio file at (relative to the system volume). This is a floating point number ranging from 0.0 (silence) to 1.0 (as loud as possible). The default is 0.5. (GTK only)

Available since: 1.2.0

Control the in-app notifications that Ghostty shows.

On Linux (GTK), in-app notifications show up as toasts. Toasts appear overlaid on top of the terminal window. They are used to show information that is not critical but may be important.

Possible notifications are:

• clipboard-copy (default: true) - Show a notification when text is copied to the clipboard.

To specify a notification to enable, specify the name of the notification. To specify a notification to disable, prefix the name with no-. For example, to disable clipboard-copy, set this configuration to no-clipboard-copy. To enable it, set this configuration to clipboard-copy.

Multiple notifications can be enabled or disabled by separating them with a comma.

A value of "false" will disable all notifications. A value of "true" will enable all notifications.

This configuration only applies to GTK.

Available since: 1.1.0

If anything other than false, fullscreen mode on macOS will not use the native fullscreen, but make the window fullscreen without animations and using a new space. It's faster than the native fullscreen mode since it doesn't use animations.

Important: tabs DO NOT WORK in this mode. Non-native fullscreen removes the titlebar and macOS native tabs require the titlebar. If you use tabs, you should not use this mode.

If you fullscreen a window with tabs, the currently focused tab will become fullscreen while the others will remain in a separate window in the background. You can switch to that window using normal window-switching keybindings such as command+tilde. When you exit fullscreen, the window will return to the tabbed state it was in before.

Allowable values are:

• true - Use non-native macOS fullscreen, hide the menu bar
• false - Use native macOS fullscreen
• visible-menu - Use non-native macOS fullscreen, keep the menu bar visible
• padded-notch - Use non-native macOS fullscreen, hide the menu bar, but ensure the window is not obscured by the notch on applicable devices. The area around the notch will remain transparent currently, but in the future we may fill it with the window background color.

Changing this option at runtime works, but will only apply to the next time the window is made fullscreen. If a window is already fullscreen, it will retain the previous setting until fullscreen is exited.

Whether the window buttons in the macOS titlebar are visible. The window buttons are the colored buttons in the upper left corner of most macOS apps, also known as the traffic lights, that allow you to close, miniaturize, and zoom the window.

This setting has no effect when window-decoration = false or macos-titlebar-style = hidden, as the window buttons are always hidden in these modes.

Valid values are:

• visible - Show the window buttons.
• hidden - Hide the window buttons.

The default value is visible.

Changing this option at runtime only applies to new windows.

Available since: 1.2.0

The style of the macOS titlebar. Available values are: "native", "transparent", "tabs", and "hidden".

The "native" style uses the native macOS titlebar with zero customization. The titlebar will match your window theme (see window-theme).

The "transparent" style is the same as "native" but the titlebar will be transparent and allow your window background color to come through. This makes a more seamless window appearance but looks a little less typical for a macOS application and may not work well with all themes.

The "transparent" style will also update in real-time to dynamic changes to the window background color, e.g. via OSC 11. To make this more aesthetically pleasing, this only happens if the terminal is a window, tab, or split that borders the top of the window. This avoids a disjointed appearance where the titlebar color changes but all the topmost terminals don't match.

The "tabs" style is a completely custom titlebar that integrates the tab bar into the titlebar. This titlebar always matches the background color of the terminal. There are some limitations to this style: On macOS 13 and below, saved window state will not restore tabs correctly. macOS 14 does not have this issue and any other macOS version has not been tested.

The "hidden" style hides the titlebar. Unlike window-decoration = false, however, it does not remove the frame from the window or cause it to have squared corners. Changing to or from this option at run-time may affect existing windows in buggy ways.

When "hidden", the top titlebar area can no longer be used for dragging the window. To drag the window, you can use option+click on the resizable areas of the frame to drag the window. This is a standard macOS behavior and not something Ghostty enables.

The default value is "transparent". This is an opinionated choice but its one I think is the most aesthetically pleasing and works in most cases.

Changing this option at runtime only applies to new windows.

Whether the proxy icon in the macOS titlebar is visible. The proxy icon is the icon that represents the folder of the current working directory. You can see this very clearly in the macOS built-in Terminal.app titlebar.

The proxy icon is only visible with the native macOS titlebar style.

Valid values are:

• visible - Show the proxy icon.
• hidden - Hide the proxy icon.

The default value is visible.

This setting can be changed at runtime and will affect all currently open windows but only after their working directory changes again. Therefore, to make this work after changing the setting, you must usually cd to a different directory, open a different file in an editor, etc.

macOS doesn't have a distinct "alt" key and instead has the "option" key which behaves slightly differently. On macOS by default, the option key plus a character will sometimes produce a Unicode character. For example, on US standard layouts option-b produces "∫". This may be undesirable if you want to use "option" as an "alt" key for keybindings in terminal programs or shells.

This configuration lets you change the behavior so that option is treated as alt.

The default behavior (unset) will depend on your active keyboard layout. If your keyboard layout is one of the keyboard layouts listed below, then the default value is "true". Otherwise, the default value is "false". Keyboard layouts with a default value of "true" are:

• U.S. Standard
• U.S. International

Note that if an Option-sequence doesn't produce a printable character, it will be treated as Alt regardless of this setting. (e.g. alt+ctrl+a).

Explicit values that can be set:

If true, the Option key will be treated as Alt. This makes terminal sequences expecting Alt to work properly, but will break Unicode input sequences on macOS if you use them via the Alt key.

You may set this to false to restore the macOS Alt key unicode sequences but this will break terminal sequences expecting Alt to work.

The values left or right enable this for the left or right Option key, respectively.

Whether to enable the macOS window shadow. The default value is true. With some window managers and window transparency settings, you may find false more visually appealing.

If true, the macOS icon in the dock and app switcher will be hidden. This is mainly intended for those primarily using the quick-terminal mode.

Note that setting this to true means that keyboard layout changes will no longer be automatic.

Control whether macOS app is excluded from the dock and app switcher, a "hidden" state. This is mainly intended for those primarily using quick-terminal mode, but is a general configuration for any use case.

Available values:

• never - The macOS app is never hidden.
• always - The macOS app is always hidden.

Note

When the macOS application is hidden, keyboard layout changes will no longer be automatic. This is a limitation of macOS.

Available since: 1.2.0

If true, Ghostty on macOS will automatically enable the "Secure Input" feature when it detects that a password prompt is being displayed.

"Secure Input" is a macOS security feature that prevents applications from reading keyboard events. This can always be enabled manually using the Ghostty > Secure Keyboard Entry menu item.

Note that automatic password prompt detection is based on heuristics and may not always work as expected. Specifically, it does not work over SSH connections, but there may be other cases where it also doesn't work.

A reason to disable this feature is if you find that it is interfering with legitimate accessibility software (or software that uses the accessibility APIs), since secure input prevents any application from reading keyboard events.

If true, Ghostty will show a graphical indication when secure input is enabled. This indication is generally recommended to know when secure input is enabled.

Normally, secure input is only active when a password prompt is displayed or it is manually (and typically temporarily) enabled. However, if you always have secure input enabled, the indication can be distracting and you may want to disable it.

Customize the macOS app icon.

This only affects the icon that appears in the dock, application switcher, etc. This does not affect the icon in Finder because that is controlled by a hardcoded value in the signed application bundle and can't be changed at runtime. For more details on what exactly is affected, see the NSApplication.icon Apple documentation; that is the API that is being used to set the icon.

Valid values:

• official - Use the official Ghostty icon.
• blueprint, chalkboard, microchip, glass, holographic, paper, retro, xray - Official variants of the Ghostty icon hand-created by artists (no AI).
• custom-style - Use the official Ghostty icon but with custom styles applied to various layers. The custom styles must be specified using the additional macos-icon-prefixed configurations. The macos-icon-ghost-color and macos-icon-screen-color configurations are required for this style.

Warning

The custom-style option is experimental. We may change the format of the custom styles in the future. We're still finalizing the exact layers and customization options that will be available.

Other caveats:

• The icon in the update dialog will always be the official icon. This is because the update dialog is managed through a separate framework and cannot be customized without significant effort.

The material to use for the frame of the macOS app icon.

Valid values:

• aluminum - A brushed aluminum frame. This is the default.
• beige - A classic 90's computer beige frame.
• plastic - A glossy, dark plastic frame.
• chrome - A shiny chrome frame.

Note

This configuration is required when macos-icon is set to custom-style.

The color of the ghost in the macOS app icon.

Note

This configuration is required when macos-icon is set to custom-style.

Specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or a named X11 color.

The color of the screen in the macOS app icon.

The screen is a linear gradient so you can specify multiple colors that make up the gradient. Up to 64 comma-separated colors may be specified as either hex (#RRGGBB or RRGGBB) or as named X11 colors. The first color is the bottom of the gradient and the last color is the top of the gradient.

Note

This configuration is required when macos-icon is set to custom-style.

Whether macOS Shortcuts are allowed to control Ghostty.

Ghostty exposes a number of actions that allow Shortcuts to control and interact with Ghostty. This includes creating new terminals, sending text to terminals, running commands, invoking any keybind action, etc.

This is a powerful feature but can be a security risk if a malicious shortcut is able to be installed and executed. Therefore, this configuration allows you to disable this feature.

Valid values are:

• ask - Ask the user whether for permission. Ghostty will remember this choice and never ask again. This is similar to other macOS permissions such as microphone access, camera access, etc.

• allow - Allow Shortcuts to control Ghostty without asking.

• deny - Deny Shortcuts from controlling Ghostty.

Available since: 1.2.0

Put every surface (tab, split, window) into a dedicated Linux cgroup.

This makes it so that resource management can be done on a per-surface granularity. For example, if a shell program is using too much memory, only that shell will be killed by the oom monitor instead of the entire Ghostty process. Similarly, if a shell program is using too much CPU, only that surface will be CPU-throttled.

This will cause startup times to be slower (a hundred milliseconds or so), so the default value is "single-instance." In single-instance mode, only one instance of Ghostty is running (see gtk-single-instance) so the startup time is a one-time cost. Additionally, single instance Ghostty is much more likely to have many windows, tabs, etc. so cgroup isolation is a big benefit.

This feature requires systemd. If systemd is unavailable, cgroup initialization will fail. By default, this will not prevent Ghostty from working (see linux-cgroup-hard-fail).

Valid values are:

• never - Never use cgroups.
• always - Always use cgroups.
• single-instance - Enable cgroups only for Ghostty instances launched as single-instance applications (see gtk-single-instance).

Memory limit for any individual terminal process (tab, split, window, etc.) in bytes. If this is unset then no memory limit will be set.

Note that this sets the "memory.high" configuration for the memory controller, which is a soft limit. You should configure something like systemd-oom to handle killing processes that have too much memory pressure.

Number of processes limit for any individual terminal process (tab, split, window, etc.). If this is unset then no limit will be set.

Note that this sets the "pids.max" configuration for the process number controller, which is a hard limit.

If this is false, then any cgroup initialization (for linux-cgroup) will be allowed to fail and the failure is ignored. This is useful if you view cgroup isolation as a "nice to have" and not a critical resource management feature, because Ghostty startup will not fail if cgroup APIs fail.

If this is true, then any cgroup initialization failure will cause Ghostty to exit or new surfaces to not be created.

Note

This currently only affects cgroup initialization. Subprocesses must always be able to move themselves into an isolated cgroup.

Enable or disable GTK's OpenGL debugging logs. The default is true for debug builds, false for all others.

Available since: 1.1.0

If true, the Ghostty GTK application will run in single-instance mode: each new ghostty process launched will result in a new window if there is already a running process.

If false, each new ghostty process will launch a separate application.

The default value is desktop which will default to true if Ghostty detects that it was launched from the .desktop file such as an app launcher (like Gnome Shell) or by D-Bus activation. If Ghostty is launched from the command line, it will default to false.

Note that debug builds of Ghostty have a separate single-instance ID so you can test single instance without conflicting with release builds.

When enabled, the full GTK titlebar is displayed instead of your window manager's simple titlebar. The behavior of this option will vary with your window manager.

This option does nothing when window-decoration is false or when running under macOS.

Determines the side of the screen that the GTK tab bar will stick to. Top, bottom, and hidden are supported. The default is top.

When hidden is set, a tab button displaying the number of tabs will appear in the title bar. It has the ability to open a tab overview for displaying tabs. Alternatively, you can use the toggle_tab_overview action in a keybind if your window doesn't have a title bar, or you can switch tabs with keybinds.

If this is true, the titlebar will be hidden when the window is maximized, and shown when the titlebar is unmaximized. GTK only.

Available since: 1.1.0

Determines the appearance of the top and bottom bars tab bar.

Valid values are:

• flat - Top and bottom bars are flat with the terminal window.
• raised - Top and bottom bars cast a shadow on the terminal area.
• raised-border - Similar to raised but the shadow is replaced with a more subtle border.

If true (default), then the Ghostty GTK tabs will be "wide." Wide tabs are the new typical Gnome style where tabs fill their available space. If you set this to false then tabs will only take up space they need, which is the old style.

Custom CSS files to be loaded.

GTK CSS documentation can be found at the following links:

• https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/css-overview.html - An overview of GTK CSS.
• https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/css-properties.html - A comprehensive list of supported CSS properties.

Launch Ghostty with env GTK_DEBUG=interactive ghostty to tweak Ghostty's CSS in real time using the GTK Inspector. Errors in your CSS files would also be reported in the terminal you started Ghostty from. See https://developer.gnome.org/documentation/tools/inspector.html for more information about the GTK Inspector.

This configuration can be repeated multiple times to load multiple files. Prepend a ? character to the file path to suppress errors if the file does not exist. If you want to include a file that begins with a literal ? character, surround the file path in double quotes ("). The file size limit for a single stylesheet is 5MiB.

Available since: 1.1.0

If true (default), applications running in the terminal can show desktop notifications using certain escape sequences such as OSC 9 or OSC 777.

Modifies the color used for bold text in the terminal.

This can be set to a specific color, using the same format as background or foreground (e.g. #RRGGBB but other formats are also supported; see the aforementioned documentation). If a specific color is set, this color will always be used for the default bold text color. It will set the rest of the bold colors to bright.

This can also be set to bright, which uses the bright color palette for bold text. For example, if the text is red, then the bold will use the bright red color. The terminal palette is set with palette but can also be overridden by the terminal application itself using escape sequences such as OSC 4. (Since Ghostty 1.2.0, the previous configuration bold-is-bright is deprecated and replaced by this usage).

Available since Ghostty 1.2.0.

This will be used to set the TERM environment variable. HACK: We set this with an xterm prefix because vim uses that to enable key protocols (specifically this will enable modifyOtherKeys), among other features. An option exists in vim to modify this: :set keyprotocol=ghostty:kitty, however a bug in the implementation prevents it from working properly. https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/13211 fixes this.

String to send when we receive ENQ (0x05) from the command that we are running. Defaults to an empty string if not set.

The mechanism used to launch Ghostty. This should generally not be set by users, see the warning below.

Warning

This is a low-level configuration that is not intended to be modified by users. All the values will be automatically detected as they are needed by Ghostty. This is only here in case our detection logic is incorrect for your environment or for developers who want to test Ghostty's behavior in different, forced environments.

This is set using the standard no-[value], [value] syntax separated by commas. Example: "no-desktop,systemd". Specific details about the available values are documented on LaunchProperties in the code. Since this isn't intended to be modified by users, the documentation is lighter than the other configurations and users are expected to refer to the code for details.

Available since: 1.2.0

Configures the low-level API to use for async IO, eventing, etc.

Most users should leave this set to auto. This will automatically detect scenarios where APIs may not be available (for example io_uring on certain hardened kernels) and fall back to a different API. However, if you want to force a specific backend for any reason, you can set this here.

Based on various benchmarks, we haven't found a statistically significant difference between the backends with regards to memory, CPU, or latency. The choice of backend is more about compatibility and features.

Available options:

• auto - Automatically choose the best backend for the platform based on available options.
• epoll - Use the epoll API
• io_uring - Use the io_uring API

If the selected backend is not available on the platform, Ghostty will fall back to an automatically chosen backend that is available.

Changing this value requires a full application restart to take effect.

This is only supported on Linux, since this is the only platform where we have multiple options. On macOS, we always use kqueue.

Available since: 1.2.0

Control the auto-update functionality of Ghostty. This is only supported on macOS currently, since Linux builds are distributed via package managers that are not centrally controlled by Ghostty.

Checking or downloading an update does not send any information to the project beyond standard network information mandated by the underlying protocols. To put it another way: Ghostty doesn't explicitly add any tracking to the update process. The update process works by downloading information about the latest version and comparing it client-side to the current version.

Valid values are:

• off - Disable auto-updates.
• check - Check for updates and notify the user if an update is available, but do not automatically download or install the update.
• download - Check for updates, automatically download the update, notify the user, but do not automatically install the update.

If unset, we defer to Sparkle's default behavior, which respects the preference stored in the standard user defaults (defaults(1)).

Changing this value at runtime works after a small delay.

The release channel to use for auto-updates.

The default value of this matches the release channel of the currently running Ghostty version. If you download a pre-release version of Ghostty then this will be set to tip and you will receive pre-release updates. If you download a stable version of Ghostty then this will be set to stable and you will receive stable updates.

Valid values are:

• stable - Stable, tagged releases such as "1.0.0".
• tip - Pre-release versions generated from each commit to the main branch. This is the version that was in use during private beta testing by thousands of people. It is generally stable but will likely have more bugs than the stable channel.

Changing this configuration requires a full restart of Ghostty to take effect.

This only works on macOS since only macOS has an auto-update feature.