Interesting take. Settings are typically something I setup once and move on. A GUI is nice (I'm sure there will be one), but not required in a v1. One of Ghostty's stated goals is sane defaults that mostly work out the box. I just checked my settings file and I changed 3 things. I think they did a pretty good job with defaults.
Finally, somewhere else in this thread someone linked a web tool that will generate the settings if you absolutely can't look up the couple you need to change.
Aren't plaintext configuration files standard? It's how I configure most applications (and how I like it, because it makes the configuration shareable).
As a DSL, it's key-value pairs. It doesn't get much simpler than that.
It's a desktop/GUI application. It's definitely not a standard for those, no.
I share the OPs frustation that I don't even know what I can configure and have to search web to be able to change something. And while the documentation is nice, it's not exactly great for this.
Also, having an explorable and searchable UI doesn't mean it's not saved in the same shareable and readable file.
The ultimate end format for the config stored on disc is completely irrelevant to how the config is created. Simple doesn’t mean easy to experiment with, simple to understand, fast to write and so on.
No one is confused as to how the ghostty config works. Key value pairs. Sure. A window full of GUI controls and system color pickers can create that config file, or I can manually by hand. I’d prefer the former.
kitty has a nicely formatted config which lists all settings along with their default values and a very detailed description of each one. It's pretty much the same as having a GUI. Maybe Ghostty can adopt this?
Same here. I was curious, so I installed it. First thing I tried to do was to change the text color, and saw there was no settings UI. This is a bit baffling to be honest.
Uninstalled it right away, I'll keep using the default MacOS Terminal app.