Ghostty 1.4 Released: History Record Limit Increased 5-Fold, Memory Usage Reduced Instead

Beating AI Express (Dongcha) – Terminal emulator Ghostty has released version 1.4.0 after 7 months of development, with nearly 2,900 code commits from 172 contributors. The update primarily resolves long-standing memory usage issues during extended terminal sessions, bringing significant improvements to performance and graphics support. Key enhancements: The new version automatically compresses off-screen terminal history when idle, decompressing on demand during review or search. Plain text history compression reduces physical memory consumption by 70% to 90%, while the default per-terminal history limit has been raised from 10MB to 50MB – even at full capacity, it remains more memory-efficient than the previous version. The update supports macOS and 64-bit Linux. Background tabs no longer consume constant GPU resources: Official macOS tests show GPU memory usage dropped from ~385MiB to 18MiB when running 1 visible tab and 20 background tabs. The terminal output reading mechanism was also rewritten, boosting macOS data throughput by 25% to 55%; outputting a 150MB text file via `cat` now takes 566ms, down from 1.5 seconds. Ghostty has also added animation and relative positioning support for Kitty’s graphics protocol. Previously, GIF animations in terminals only displayed as static images, but they now play correctly. The founder noted this is the first terminal besides Kitty to fully implement this graphics protocol. Additional updates include support for macOS 27, EGL-based rendering for Linux, and `ghostty +ssh` which automatically installs required terminal configurations when connecting to remote servers. Ten security vulnerabilities were fixed, including one related to Kitty’s graphics instructions: attackers could trick terminals into displaying malicious output, potentially causing crashes, abnormal memory usage, and in specific scenarios, reading or deleting files outside temporary directories.