Ghostty 1.4 compresses scrollback, cuts memory use by up to 90%
The terminal's latest release finishes its Kitty graphics support, adds an SSH wrapper, and patches ten security bugs including one letting a clicked link run arbitrary commands on macOS.
Ghostty 1.4.0 shipped on 27 October, the result of seven months of work from 172 contributors across 2,889 commits. The headline change is scrollback compression: a text-heavy history now uses 70 to 90 percent less memory, which lets the default scrollback limit rise from 10MB to 50MB without the old cost. Parsing is faster too, plain ASCII text processing jumped from 128 MB/s to 725 MB/s, and replaying real terminal recordings runs about 25 percent quicker.
The release also finishes Ghostty’s Kitty graphics protocol support, including animation and relative placements, making it the first non-Kitty terminal to implement the spec in full. A new ghostty +ssh wrapper installs Ghostty’s terminfo on a remote host the first time you connect to it, so programs that check $TERM behave correctly over SSH. macOS 27 is now fully supported, and GTK builds move their minimum requirement up to GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7.
Ten security advisories are fixed in this release, among them a bug where a malicious Kitty graphics command could crash Ghostty or read and delete files, and a macOS flaw where Cmd-clicking a hyperlink could run an arbitrary command. Ghostty says it requested CVEs for these weeks ago but GitHub has not yet assigned them.
Why it matters: if you live in a terminal with long-running sessions or heavy scrollback, this is a real resource win, not a cosmetic one. The security fixes, especially the clickable-hyperlink and malicious-graphics bugs, are reason enough to update regardless.