My minimal Ghostty config post got way more traction than I expected. Apparently, people really care about their terminals. Anyway, Ghostty 1.3 dropped on March 10th, and there’s actually stuff worth updating. The headliner is scrollback search — the most requested feature since launch — plus a few other things that quietly make the daily driver experience better.

Scrollback Search, Finally

If you’ve been using Ghostty as your main terminal, you’ve probably had this moment: you ran a command 20 minutes ago, you need the output, and you’re either scrolling back with two fingers hoping you’ll spot it, or you’ve gotten comfortable with tmux copy-mode.

tmux copy-mode works fine. I used it for years. But it’s an extra mental layer — prefix key, [, start searching, exit copy mode. Ghostty now has native search: Cmd+F on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+F on Linux. It highlights all matches in the viewport and you jump between them with Cmd+G / Shift+Cmd+G (macOS) or Enter / Shift+Enter on GTK. The search box floats in a corner and you can reposition it. On macOS it hooks into standard system shortcuts for Find Next/Previous, which means muscle memory from every other app just works.

Performance held up too — apparently they tested against 4GB asciinema files and it went from “several minutes” to seconds. For normal scrollback? You won’t feel a thing.

What Else Changed

Native scrollbar — 1.3 adds a configurable overlay scrollbar that respects your OS defaults. If you want to keep the clean look:

scrollbar = never

Or leave it at auto to follow system settings. The overlay style (fades in while scrolling, fades out otherwise) is actually tasteful if you want scroll position context.

Command completion notifications — Three new options control when Ghostty notifies you that a long-running command finished. Defaults to triggering for commands over 5 seconds when the window is unfocused — via bell or system notification. If you kick off npm install and switch tabs, this is useful.

Clickable shell prompts — With shell integration (Fish 4+ and Nushell 0.111+ have it natively), you can click to reposition your cursor within a prompt like it’s a text field. Small thing, weirdly nice.

My Updated Config

Everything from the original post still stands — tmux keybindings, opacity, font thickening. I didn’t rip anything out. The only addition I’ve made:

# 1.3: explicit scrollbar off
scrollbar = never

That’s it. The scrollback search keybind (Cmd+F) works out of the box — no config needed. The notifications I haven’t touched yet; I’ll enable them when the absence starts annoying me.

I tried scrollbar = auto for about a week before reverting. Old habit — if there’s no scrollbar, I’m mentally forced to stay near the bottom. With a scrollbar I start drifting up and losing context. Your mileage may vary.

Ghostty keeps shipping features without turning into one of those terminals that needs a YAML novel just to change a color. 1.3 feels like it crossed the line from “really good but missing obvious things” to just done. Worth upgrading.