That’s fair, I get the frustration.
I guess I’ve been cutting Mitchell some slack since this is a passion project for him - his goal was to build the modern terminal he always wanted, so an opinionated feature set was always expected. And, new terminals with actual new features need their own terminfo entries, it just comes with the territory. It’ll sort itself out as the databases catch up.
For now, though, you don’t need to address this on an individual host level. I’m in the same boat at work with thousands of servers. If you want to give Ghostty another shot, this wrapper handles the issue automatically, even for servers where AcceptEnv doesn’t include TERM or where SetEnv is disabled:
ssh() {
if [[ "$TERM" == "xterm-ghostty" ]]; then
TERM=xterm-256color command ssh "$@"
else
command ssh "$@"
fi
}
Just drop it in your .bashrc (or functions.sh if you rock a modular setup) and SSH connections will auto-switch to compatible terminfo while keeping your local session full-featured. Best of both worlds. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wow - you’ve certainly got a unique perspective on the situation, and I’m grateful that you took the time to share it. Thank you. It’s fascinating to hear from someone who actually worked with the guy.
I can relate to both the Linux struggle and your “I get their PoV but disagree” reaction. Had the same feeling when Kitty’s creator dismissed multiplexers as “a hack” - as a longtime tmux user, that stung. Great tool, but that philosophy never sat right with me. I bounced between most of the more popular terminals for years (Wezterm rocks but has performance issues, Kitty never felt quite right) so I was eager for Ghostty to drop. So far it’s delivered on what I was hoping for (despite needing a minor tweak or two out of the box).
I’m glad you found my last response so helpful. Sounds like exploring alternatives worked out well for you in the end, which is what matters. Cheers. :)