Ghostty 1.4.0 Raises Its GTK Floor Past Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Compresses Idle Scrollback

Ghostty 1.4.0, released October 27, 2026, now requires GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7 on Linux, up from 4.14 and 1.5, and the project's own notes say Ubuntu 24.04 LTS does not meet that bar.

The release notes on ghostty.org put the work at seven months, 172 contributors and 2,889 commits. The release slipped by one month, and Ghostty 1.5 is planned for March 2027.

What Ghostty 1.4.0 changes on Linux and macOS

The Linux change that will matter first is the toolkit floor. The notes list the OpenGL minimum as unchanged at 4.3, but rendering now goes through a new EGL renderer that uses triple buffering and draws at true fractional scale. Anyone on an LTS desktop who builds Ghostty from source against distro libraries should check versions before upgrading.

On macOS the headline is memory. Idle scrollback is now compressed on macOS and 64-bit Linux, which the notes say cuts resident memory by 70% to 90%. The default scrollback limit rises from 10 MB to 50 MB, so part of the saving is spent on a longer buffer.

An empty macOS terminal drops from 128 KiB to about 16 KiB, and 20 hidden tabs drop from about 385 MiB of GPU memory to 18 MiB. All of these are the project's own measurements. The notes do not name the hardware.

1. Before 1.4.01500 ms
2. Ghostty 1.4.0566 ms

Source: Ghostty 1.4.0 release notes (project-supplied), accessed 2026-10-28

The notes also report macOS I/O throughput 25% to 55% higher and plain ASCII parsing up from 128 MB/s to 725 MB/s.

Kitty graphics: the 100% claim and the 16x figure

The notes say Ghostty's implementation of the Kitty graphics protocol "now covers 100% of the published specification", and that this makes Ghostty and libghostty the first terminal to do so outside Kitty itself. That is a project claim about its own coverage. The spec lives at sw.kovidgoyal.net. It lists Ghostty among terminals that implement it, and it has sections on animation and on relative placements, the two pieces 1.4.0 adds. Relative placements arrived in Kitty 0.31.0.

Image parsing is about 16x faster in the project's benchmarks. The notes give no absolute baseline, so the multiplier is hard to translate into frames or seconds.

Breaking changes and the settings to check

Setting	What changed
copy-on-select	Accepts none, primary, clipboard or both; macOS default is now none
scrollback-limit	Renamed scrollback-limit-bytes; old name deprecated but working
macOS cmd+arrow_up/down	Runs jump_to_prompt again instead of scrolling to top or bottom
GTK ctrl+shift+page_up/down	Now moves tabs; jump_to_prompt moved to ctrl+shift+arrow_up/down

The copy-on-select default is the one most users will feel. On macOS, selecting text no longer touches any clipboard unless the setting is changed back.

Ten security advisories, no CVE numbers yet

The release lists ten security advisories. Paste protection missed carriage returns. Malicious Kitty graphics commands could crash Ghostty or read and delete files. A tmux control mode crash affected 1.3.0 and 1.3.1, and zsh shell integration could be abused through crafted directory names. Several macOS issues involved cmd-click links, drag-and-drop and file names.

The notes say CVEs were requested and not yet assigned, so scanners keyed to CVE IDs will not flag older builds for now. The graphics-protocol items show that wider spec coverage widens the parsing surface. Another project had a similar month: Node.js fixed 10 CVEs, four of them follow-ups to earlier patches.

Money, libghostty and the dropped Windows GUI

The notes disclose spending: $41,820 paid to contributors under contract during the cycle, about $1,260 on infrastructure, and two 12-month contracts signed. That is a small budget for a release with 2,889 commits.

libghostty-vt, the embeddable terminal core, builds on macOS, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Android, iOS and WebAssembly. The notes expect a libghostty 1.0 tag but give no date, and the API still breaks compatibility. The project dropped its roadmap for a native Windows GUI, while libghostty keeps Windows support. Open-source maintainers had a rough week elsewhere too, when the Python JIT authors withdrew PEP 836 and removal became the default.

Ghostty 1.5 is the next date to watch. The notes set it for March 2027, and the macOS 13 minimum is slated to go in a future release.