New user experience could use improvement

[dubrowgn]

I just started trying ghostty and the core terminal experience is pretty good so far! It's fast and works well out-of-the-box. However, there were several issues I encountered that I nearly gave up trying to solve. This is just an FYI and my opinion.

1. Out-of-the-box visual bell is super distracting. Every time I press tab, the window is trying to get my attention. I know, I'm literally already looking at and interacting with the window. I get the impression this kind attention grabbing thing is normal for MacOS, but e.g. gnome-terminal does not do this by default (or any linux terminal I can think of off the top of my head). Probably because it's super annoying.
2. Out-of-the-box toasts when copying text is likewise distracting. I know, I literally just pushed the buttons to copy text. No other desktop application I can think of gives you a notification when you successfully copy text. I'm not sure why it's the default in ghostty.
3. Changing configs in ghostty is surprising and inconsistent. Some settings immediately apply to new windows. Other settings don't. It took me an embarrassing long time to turn off bell-features and app-notifications, despite using the correct config values, because I still had other ghostty windows open.
   • Changing background immediately applies to new windows even when other windows are already open. This setting appears to be per window
   • Changing bell-features only works for both new and old windows by reloading config. This setting appears to be somehow global
   • Changing app-notifications only works if you quit all ghostty windows. This setting appears to be global, and only inspected during application launch

ghostty is an amazing piece of software though. Hopefully this doesn't come across too harsh.

Thanks!

[rhodes-b]

Out-of-the-box visual bell is super distracting. Every time I press tab, the window is trying to get my attention. I know, I'm literally already looking at and interacting with the window. I get the impression this kind attention grabbing thing is normal for MacOS, but e.g. gnome-terminal does not do this by default (or any linux terminal I can think of off the top of my head). Probably because it's super annoying.

This does not happen to me so it must be something with your environment is your shell sending a bell for a invalid action maybe?
IIRC gnome-terminal does spam audio bells by default when the shell is sending them for invalid actions. Id say audio is much worse than a bell icon in the titlebar.

Changing configs in ghostty is surprising and inconsistent. Some settings immediately apply to new windows. Other settings don't. It took me an embarrassing long time to turn off bell-features and app-notifications, despite using the correct config values, because I still had other ghostty windows open.
Changing background immediately applies to new windows even when other windows are already open. This setting appears to be per window
Changing bell-features only works for both new and old windows by reloading config. This setting appears to be somehow global
Changing app-notifications only works if you quit all ghostty windows. This setting appears to be global, and only inspected during application launch

I think you are confused on how ghostty works. In alot of cases ghostty tries to run within a single GTK instance even for new windows, some of those situations are if you have the systemd service enabled or invoke ghostty +new-window or click on the desktop file.
Settings are never reloaded automatically for a existing ghostty process you have to do it manually either with a keybind or sending SIGUSER2 signal to ghostty.
Spawning an entirely new process will reload the configuration if you were launching ghostty the same way every time then there shouldn't be inconsistent behavior of what runs in a existing process vs a new process, an example of how that can be done is ghostty --gtk-single-instance=false

Now there are some settings which after reloading the config only apply to new windows / tabs etc the docs try to point these out but some may be missing, I don't believe the ones you mentioned having a problem with are subject to that. I also tried app-notifications that does apply properly to exiting windows when reloading so im not sure why you had to restart the entire app

this explains a bit more the auto detection for single instance and how the systemd service works
https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#gtk-single-instance
https://ghostty.org/docs/linux/systemd

[dubrowgn]

This does not happen to me so it must be something with your environment

I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2009, with many different distros and many different window managers. I've never needed to disable bell alerts before now. Maybe its "something with my environment", but somehow other terminals are still doing the right thing. If it helps, I'm using Linux Mint 22.2, and I try to keep my environment as close to vanilla as possible.

I think you are confused on how ghostty works.

This is a certainty as a new user, but should new users have to be familiar with ghostty's architecture to successfully change settings?

[pluiedev]

Out-of-the-box visual bell is super distracting.

What desktop environment are you using? On most DEs I can think of (GNOME/KDE/most window managers) requesting the attention of the focused window does nothing. I can understand the title flashing being somewhat annoying, but requesting attention being intrusive is not something I expected. For reference, on GNOME requesting attention will only result in a "[app name] is ready" notification if the window is not focused, and on KDE the dock icon turns orange. I don't really think either of these two implementations are that distracting.

Out-of-the-box toasts when copying text is likewise distracting.

You are, as far as I know, the second (ever) person to complain about this (the previous instance was in #8498). The important note here is that the toast is not always triggered when the user manually does Ctrl+Shift+C — terminal apps like TUI text editors could, through a terminal protocol extension (OSC 52), copy or paste to the clipboard, and in that case it is absolutely vital that that is communicated to the user. It is arguable whether this should also be the case when it's "obvious" that something is copied, but we show a toast either way for consistency.

Changing configs in ghostty is surprising and inconsistent.

That is indeed something we're trying to work on, but so far the config propagation code is somewhat of a mess. Hopefully in the future we have a mechanism of notifying the user of when a config hot reload is ineffectual, but for now this is how things stand.

Thanks for doing this critique, by the way — sometimes one can spend too much time working on something and lose sight of what an outsider perspective can provide. There may be points that I disagree with, but someone should voice them nonetheless :)