After trying iTerm2, Warp, Kitty, and several other terminal emulators, I finally settled on Ghostty as my daily terminal in 2026.
The overall experience feels extremely modern:
- very fast startup
- native macOS feeling
- smooth rendering
- beautiful transparency and blur effects
- excellent font rendering
- lightweight and responsive
Combined with a modern shell workflow, it creates a setup that feels much closer to a professional development environment than a traditional terminal.
Ghostty Configuration
I currently use the following Ghostty configuration:
background-opacity = 0.9
background-blur = macos-glass-clear
macos-titlebar-style = transparent
window-padding-x = 14
window-padding-y = 14
This setup creates a floating Liquid Glass style terminal on macOS.
The combination of:
- transparency
- blur
- padding
makes the terminal feel very similar to Apple's modern UI design language.
Especially on macOS, the visual experience is surprisingly good.
Zsh Autosuggestions + Syntax Highlighting
These two plugins dramatically improve the command-line experience.
Install them with:
brew install zsh-autosuggestions zsh-syntax-highlighting && \
echo 'source $(brew --prefix)/share/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh' >> ~/.zshrc && \
echo 'source $(brew --prefix)/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh' >> ~/.zshrc && \
source ~/.zshrc
Features:
- automatic command suggestions from history
- syntax highlighting
- colored commands
- colored paths
- invalid command detection
Examples:
- valid commands appear in green
- invalid commands appear in red
- directories, files, and links display with different colors
This makes the terminal feel much more modern and readable.
fzf: The Most Useful Terminal Tool
I also highly recommend installing fzf.
brew install fzf
$(brew --prefix)/opt/fzf/install
fzf is a fuzzy finder for the terminal.
Once installed, it upgrades many shell interactions.
The most useful feature is:
Ctrl + R
This enables fuzzy searching through command history.
For example, typing:
docker
can instantly search commands like:
docker ps
docker logs
docker exec -it xxx sh
docker compose up
This becomes incredibly useful once your command history grows over time.
Some Simple fzf Examples
Search command history:
Ctrl + R
Search files:
fzf
Open files with Vim:
vim $(fzf)
Fuzzy-search Docker containers:
docker ps | fzf
Fuzzy-search Kubernetes pods:
kubectl get pods | fzf