Ghostty 1.4.0

Ghostty 1.4.0, released on October 27, 2026, is a major update featuring performance and memory improvements, a complete Kitty graphics implementation, SSH integration enhancements, and numerous other fixes and additions. This release is the result of 7 months of work from 172 contributors, with changes spanning over 2,889 commits. Human maintainers crafted these release notes, which took around 16+ hours to complete.

The update supports macOS 27, retaining compatibility with previous macOS versions, including 13 (Ventura). Notable enhancements include Kitty graphics integration, enabling animation and relative placements. Programs with animated images, such as GIFs, now display animated content within Ghostty. Relative placements allow images to be positioned relative to each other, enabling child images to move alongside their parent.

The implementation adheres to the Kitty specification, fixing over 40 behavioral discrepancies and improving performance by 16x for large image transfers and reducing per-frame drawing costs.

Ghostty 1.4 also transparently compresses scrollback history when not visible, reducing memory usage by 70-90% for typical text-heavy history. Resident memory consumption has increased from 10 MB to 50 MB, with no impact on virtual memory. Performance improvements include draining the pty on one thread while parsing on another, resulting in a 25-55% increase in end-to-end I/O throughput on macOS.

The GTK app now uses a new rendering pipeline, drawing with EGL and exporting frames as DMABUF, leading to less tearing and crisp text rendering at fractional display scales. The Kitty clipboard protocol (OSC 5522) is now supported for plain text read and write in Ghostty 1.4.