ghostty-config

A reference for configuring Ghostty, a terminal application for macOS and Linux. It covers configuration files, options, keyboard shortcuts, themes, fonts, and shell integration.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create, edit, or troubleshoot Ghostty configuration files, keybinds, themes, fonts, and command-line options.
Why use it?
It helps avoid incorrect settings and accounts for differences between Ghostty on macOS and Linux.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sammcj/agentic-coding/ghostty-config
Any agent
npx skills add sammcj/agentic-coding --skill ghostty-config
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sammcj/agentic-coding

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,580 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00062 $0.01580
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00790
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00316
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00158

Measured 3d ago against content hash 1534b9fb4862, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ghostty-config scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Skills/ghostty-config/SKILL.md · 115 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 115 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ghostty Configuration

Config File Locations

Config is optional; with no file Ghostty runs on its defaults. Since Ghostty 1.2.3 the file is named config.ghostty; extensionless config still loads for backwards compatibility.

  • XDG (all platforms): $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ghostty/config.ghostty, then $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ghostty/config. XDG_CONFIG_HOME defaults to ~/.config.
  • macOS also: ~/Library/Application Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/config.ghostty, then .../config.

Every matching file loads, later files overriding earlier ones. Within a location config.ghostty loads before config. On macOS the macOS-path files load after the XDG ones, so macOS paths win on conflict.

Syntax

# Comments start with #
background = 282c34
font-family = "JetBrains Mono"
keybind = ctrl+z=close_surface
font-family =                     # Empty value resets to default
  • Keys are case-sensitive: use lowercase.
  • Repeatable keys (font-family, keybind, palette, env, link) accumulate across lines.
  • Every config key doubles as a CLI flag: ghostty --background=282c34 --font-size=14.

Includes

config-file = themes/dark.conf
config-file = ?local.conf       # ? prefix = optional, no error if missing

config-file directives are processed at the end of the containing file, so keys written after one still lose to the included file's values. Put overrides in the included file, or include first and keep the parent free of conflicting keys.

Applying Changes

  • Reload: ctrl+shift+, (Linux), cmd+shift+, (macOS). Some options need a restart; some apply only to newly created terminals.
  • Validate after every edit: ghostty +validate-config.

CLI Actions

ghostty +<action>; add --help for per-action help.

Command Purpose
ghostty +validate-config Check the config for errors
ghostty +show-config Show the effective configuration
ghostty +show-config --default --docs Show defaults with documentation
ghostty +edit-config Open the config in the default editor
ghostty +list-fonts Available fixed-width fonts
ghostty +list-themes Available colour themes
ghostty +list-colors Available X11 colour names
ghostty +list-keybinds Current keybinds (--default for defaults)
ghostty +list-actions All keybind actions
ghostty +show-face Font face information
ghostty +ssh-cache Manage the SSH terminfo cache
ghostty +new-window Open a new window (Linux only)

Read the full file on GitHub · 115 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 115 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 1534b9fb4862

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ghostty-config is a skill published in the GitHub repository sammcj/agentic-coding (158 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 1,580 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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