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Quil vs Ghostty

A fast, feature-rich terminal emulator written in Zig by Mitchell Hashimoto, with platform-native UI and GPU-accelerated rendering. macOS and Linux, MIT-licensed, 1.3.1 current. It draws the window — it does not keep the work.

Ghostty · where it wins

The best window you can put Quil in.

The best window you can put Quil in. GPU-accelerated rendering with a Metal backend on macOS and OpenGL on Linux, a SIMD-optimised terminal parser, Unicode 17 grapheme clustering, the Kitty graphics protocol, in-window scrollback search, native scrollbars, a large built-in theme catalogue, and prompt-aware shell integration that lets you jump between prompts, select a command's whole output, and click inside a prompt to move the cursor.

Quil · where it takes over

The window closes. The work doesn't.

Ghostty is an emulator, so nothing it draws outlives it. Quit the app and every split, every running command and every AI conversation goes with it — its window restore is macOS-only and brings back windows and tabs, not processes. It has no server, so there is no detach, no reattach, and no way to reach a session on another machine from a local client. It has no notion of an AI agent, so it cannot tell you which one is mid-turn and which one is parked on a permission prompt. And there is no official Windows build at all.

Where they fit

This is the one comparison on this site whose honest answer is “use both”. Ghostty draws the window: GPU-accelerated glyphs, native tabs and splits, scrollback search, and the deepest shell integration of any emulator. Quil runs inside that window and keeps the work: a daemon owns the panes, snapshots them to disk, and hands them back after a reboot with the AI sessions still attached. Quit Ghostty and its splits are gone. Quit Ghostty with Quil inside it and nothing stopped — reopen, type quil, and the panes are still running. Different layers of the same stack.

Capability matrix

Feature by feature

capability	quil	Ghostty
Draws the terminal itself (GPU, fonts, ligatures)	no	yes
└── Deliberate on both sides. Quil is a TUI with no renderer of its own — it runs inside Ghostty, WezTerm, Windows Terminal, iTerm2 or a bare Linux console. Ghostty is where that work belongs, and it is very good at it.
Work survives quitting the terminal app	yes	no
└── Quil's panes are owned by a background daemon, not by the window. Ghostty's splits are windows; closing the app ends the processes in them.
Survives a full host reboot	yes	no
└── Ghostty's `window-save-state` is macOS-only and restores windows and tabs, not the programs that were running in them. Quil snapshots the whole workspace continuously, so a reboot returns the projects, tabs, split layout, working directories and scrollback, and resumes the Claude Code, OpenCode or Codex conversation by session id. A plain terminal pane comes back as a fresh shell in its own directory — an arbitrary foreground command is not resumed, and no multiplexer resumes one.
AI session auto-resume (Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex)	yes	no
Agent state at a glance (working / blocked / done)	yes	no
└── Quil reads hook events from the agent itself, so it knows the difference between mid-turn and parked on a permission prompt. An emulator has no feed for that.
Typed panes (Terminal / AI / SSH / tools)	yes	no
MCP server an AI assistant can drive	yes	no
└── Ghostty is scriptable on macOS through AppleScript and Apple Shortcuts, which is a genuinely nice control surface — but it is not a protocol Claude Desktop, Cursor or VS Code speak, and it is macOS-only.
Remote attach: client local, sessions on another host	yes	no
└── Ghostty wraps `ssh` to set up the remote environment correctly, which is useful and not the same thing. It has no server, so there is nothing to attach to.
Several hosts' sessions side by side in one client	yes	no
Tabs and splits	yes	yes
└── Ghostty 1.3 added split drag-and-drop, zoom preservation across navigation, editable tab titles and per-surface working-directory inheritance. Both tools do this well; only one of them keeps the result.
Command palette	yes	yes
└── Ghostty's is `cmd+shift+p` / `ctrl+shift+p` and reaches every keybind action, bound or not. Quil's `Alt+Shift+P` also fuzzy-finds panes, tabs and projects.
Search scrollback	yes	partial
└── Ghostty added in-window search in 1.3 and runs it on its own thread — but it searches the focused surface. Quil's search runs daemon-wide and returns matches from every pane at once, with a preview and a match count per pane.
Prompt-aware navigation (jump to prompt, select a command's output)	no	yes
└── An honest gap, and one we intend to close. Quil already injects the OSC 133 marks that make this possible and currently reads only the command-finished one. Ghostty turns the same marks into prompt jumping, output selection and click-to-move-cursor.
Native Windows (no WSL)	yes	no
└── Ghostty ships macOS and Linux builds only. Native Windows exists solely as community forks and a separate derivative, Noctty. Quil ships a native Windows binary on ConPTY with bundled OpenConsole for Windows 10.
Themes with light/dark auto-switch	no	yes
└── Ghostty carries a large theme catalogue and can pair a light and a dark one. Quil ships no presets on purpose — it asks the terminal for its real foreground and background over OSC 10/11 and renders against those, so it inherits Ghostty's theme instead of fighting it.
Desktop notification when a long command finishes	partial	yes
└── Ghostty's fires only past a configurable duration, so a fast command stays silent. Quil raises Windows toasts on agent attention states and routes a click back to the pane, but has no duration floor and no macOS or Linux transport yet.
Per-pane Docker sandbox for an AI agent	yes	no
Git worktree per tab	yes	no

Migrating from Ghostty

Coming from Ghostty?

There is nothing to migrate — Quil is not a replacement for Ghostty and never wanted to be. Install Quil, keep Ghostty as your terminal, and run `quil` inside it. Ghostty keeps doing fonts, colours and GPU compositing; Quil takes over panes, persistence and AI sessions. If you already use Ghostty's own splits, the adjustment is that Quil's splits are the ones that survive — so make Quil's the outer layer and let Ghostty hold a single full-size surface.

Questions

Is Quil a Ghostty alternative?

No, and we would rather you did not treat it as one. Ghostty is a terminal emulator — it owns the window, the font rendering and the GPU. Quil is a multiplexer and workflow orchestrator that runs inside a terminal emulator. The nearest true comparison is Quil vs tmux or Quil vs Zellij. Against Ghostty the right question is not which to pick, it is which layer you were missing.

Does Quil run inside Ghostty?

Yes, and it is a good pairing. Quil needs a terminal with PTY support and sensible colour handling, which describes Ghostty exactly. Ghostty also implements the Kitty keyboard protocol, which is what lets Quil distinguish key combinations that older terminals collapse. Run Ghostty as a single full-size surface and let Quil own the splits, so the splits are the ones that survive a reboot.

Ghostty already has tabs and splits. Do I still need Quil?

If you only need tabs and splits for the length of one sitting, no — Ghostty's are excellent and cost you nothing extra. You need Quil when the sitting ends: when you close the laptop, reboot for an update, or lose the SSH link, and want the same panes, the same scrollback and the same Claude Code conversation back. Ghostty's splits are windows and end with the app. Quil's panes are owned by a daemon and do not.

Ghostty's author is building a multiplexer. Should I wait for it?

Mitchell Hashimoto announced Superlogical on 30 July 2026, and its first product is a server-side terminal multiplexer built on libghostty, with web, macOS and iOS clients and live session sharing. We think it will be very good. As of September 2026 nothing has shipped, no timeline is public, and the announcement deliberately withholds features and pricing. Quil is available now, is Apache-2.0, runs natively on Windows, and needs no account and no server you do not own.

Does Ghostty run on Windows?

Not officially. Ghostty ships macOS and Linux builds; native Windows support exists only as community forks and a separate derivative called Noctty. If you are on Windows, pair Quil with Windows Terminal or WezTerm — Quil itself is native there, using ConPTY with a bundled OpenConsole on Windows 10, and needs no WSL.

Other comparisons

▸ install quil every capability →

Quil installs side by side with Ghostty. Nothing to uninstall first.