Ghostty vs Hyper

Ghostty is a free, open-source terminal emulator for macOS and Linux. It renders with Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux for GPU acceleration, while native interface components provide multiple windows, tabs, and split panes. Its shared libghostty core handles terminal emulation, fonts, and rendering through a cross-platform C ABI. Ghostty includes hundreds of themes and can follow system light and dark modes automatically. It supports the Kitty graphics protocol for terminal images and provides automatic shell integration for bash, elvish, fish, nushell, and zsh. SSH integration can forward environment variables and install Ghostty terminfo entries on remote hosts. macOS Secure Keyboard Entry helps protect passwords from other processes, and official macOS binaries are signed and notarized. Ghostty is licensed under MIT and fiscally sponsored by Hack Club, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Community help is available through GitHub Discussions and Discord; there is no dedicated support team. The Ghostty plan is free, described as free and open source with no commercial backing.

Hyper is a free terminal application for people working in a command-line interface. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with split panes, GPU acceleration, SSH support, and a scripting API. The project says speed and stability are priorities and uses xterm.js as its terminal engine. Users can configure the shell, environment variables, appearance, window size, scrollback, and other settings in .hyper.js, and change command bindings there as well. Themes and extensions provide additional ways to alter or intercept terminal behavior. Extensions are Node.js modules available on npm; the API lets plugins work with React components and Redux actions. Plugins can be reloaded with Command+R, and Hyper also loads them periodically or after plugin configuration changes. Downloads are listed for macOS, Windows, Debian, Fedora, and AppImage. The displayed latest version is v3.4.1.