Ghostty vs Warp

Ghostty

Ghostty is a terminal emulator built from scratch in Zig by Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp). It uses a custom GPU rendering pipeline targeting Metal on macOS and OpenGL 3.3/Vulkan on Linux, delivering 2ms key-to-screen latency at the threshold of human perception. The macOS app is a true SwiftUI application with real windowing, menu bars, and a settings GUI rather than a web-wrapped Electron shell. It outperforms every competitor in raw rendering benchmarks while looking and feeling completely native on each platform. There are no AI features built in, which is the point: Ghostty is for developers who want the fastest, most reliable terminal possible and run their AI tools (Claude Code, Codex CLI, etc.) inside it. For anyone frustrated with Electron-based terminals, Ghostty is the performance ceiling.

Warp is a terminal emulator written in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering, used by 700K+ developers. Its defining innovation is block-based output where every command execution produces a discrete container holding the command, its output, and metadata, transforming the terminal from a scroll of text into a structured document. The AI features include natural language command generation, error explanation and debugging, context-aware autocomplete, and Agent Mode which can autonomously edit files, generate code, and manage complex workflows. It supports Anthropic, OpenAI, and other model providers. The IDE-style text editing with multi-cursor support, find-and-replace, and syntax highlighting makes it feel like a code editor that happens to be a terminal. For developers who want AI built directly into their terminal rather than as a separate tool, Warp is the most complete option.