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Forkbench vs Ghostty
Ghostty is a fast, zero-config terminal emulator by Mitchell Hashimoto, written in Zig with a native Swift interface on macOS and released free under the MIT license.
Ghostty is the terminal a lot of Mac developers switched to in 2025, and it deserved it. It renders fast, it needs no config, and it feels native. Forkbench is not a faster Ghostty and is not asking you to give one up. It is a Mac app for running your coding agents, and every pane in it is a real login shell, so your prompt, your aliases, tmux and vim behave exactly as they do now. The difference is what sits around the shell. Ghostty is built to draw text as fast as possible. Forkbench is built for the day you have four coding agents running and need to know what each one is doing.
| Forkbench | Ghostty | |
|---|---|---|
| Real login shell | Yes, a generic PTY per tab | Yes |
| Your tools (tmux, vim, fzf, zsh) | Untouched | Untouched |
| Platform | macOS 13+ only | macOS and Linux |
| Rendering | GPU-accelerated (Metal) | GPU-accelerated (Metal), benchmarked fastest on macOS |
| Tabs and splits | Both, with drag-to-resize splits | Both, native |
| Inline images / keyboard protocol | Kitty graphics and Kitty keyboard protocols | Kitty graphics and Kitty keyboard protocols |
| Built for coding agents | Yes, the whole design | No, agent-neutral by choice |
| Task board that survives a reboot | Yes, per Thread | No |
| Secrets handling | Vault (Pro), sealed on your Mac | Inherits the shell environment |
| Notes agents can read | Notebooks, end-to-end encrypted, free and synced | No |
| Remote and multi-Mac | Yes (Pro) | No |
| Config surface | App settings, no scripting language | Text config, live reload |
| Open source | Closed | Yes (MIT) |
| Price | Free; Pro €30/mo; Team $30/seat, dropping to $20 at scale | Free |
| Credentials an agent can use but never read | Vault (Pro) holds it, and it goes to the one command that needs it, so it never reaches the prompt, the command line or the transcript. A seatbelt, not a guarantee: an agent you authorise for a command could still print what it was handed. | Not a terminal feature. A key in your shell or in a .env is readable by anything you run, agents included. |
Where Ghostty is strong
- Genuinely fast. GPU-accelerated rendering through Metal, and it stays smooth under heavy output.
- Zero config. It is good on first launch without a dotfile.
- Free and MIT licensed, so you can read and fork the whole thing.
- Runs on Linux as well as macOS. Forkbench is Mac only.
- Ligatures, styled underlines, live config reload, and a built-in inspector for performance work.
Where Forkbench differs
- Agents run commands that use your API keys without the value entering the prompt, the command line or the transcript. Vault is part of Pro.
- Folders the macOS kernel enforces. A Thread can be locked to the folders the job is about, applied as each shell starts and inherited by every process it spawns, so an agent cannot read or write outside them. Builds still run and the network is untouched.
- Tabs group into Threads. A Thread carries its own folder, its notes, its secrets and its task board, so switching context is switching Thread rather than reading tab titles.
- A task board that outlives the terminal. Close a pane, quit the app, reboot the Mac, and the plan, the progress notes and the blockers are still there, sealed the whole time.
- A git panel that always reflects the focused tab, plus a new branch on a fresh worktree in one click.
- Reach a running agent from the web or your phone, and hand a note to a pane on a countdown so a prompt lands when you expect your quota back.
The bottom line
If your terminal is where you type commands and you want the fastest, cleanest, most open one, Ghostty is an excellent answer and this page will not talk you out of it. If your terminal is where three or four coding agents run all day, the bottleneck stops being rendering speed and becomes keeping track of them. That is the part Forkbench builds: the board, the keys, the notes, and a way to reach the whole thing from your phone. Both are free to try, so the honest test is a week with each.
Keep reading
Comparison based on publicly available information as of mid-2026. Spot something out of date? Tell us.