Ghostty 1.4.0 was released on October 27, 2026, and its maintainers are calling it a major release. The terminal emulator now ships a fully complete Kitty graphics implementation — including animation and relative placements — making it the first terminal outside Kitty itself to reach 100% of the published specification.
The update covers seven months of work: 2,889 commits from 172 contributors across all platforms. Beyond graphics, Ghostty 1.4 brings large performance and memory improvements, better SSH integration and hundreds of smaller fixes, according to the official release notes.
Kitty graphics and animation support
The headline feature is the finished Kitty graphics protocol. Programs that display animated images, such as an animated GIF rendered with kitten icat, now animate properly inside Ghostty instead of freezing on a single frame. Frame transmission, composition and playback control are all supported, and animations pause automatically when the terminal window isn't visible.
Relative placements let one image be positioned relative to another's placement, so a child image moves with its parent. The team also ran a full conformance pass against the spec and Kitty itself, fixing dozens of behavioral differences — images now scroll with text inside scroll regions, retransmitting an image ID replaces the old one, and invalid image data returns an error instead of failing silently.
- 100% of the published Kitty graphics spec, a first outside Kitty
- Animated images play instead of showing one still frame
- Animations pause when the terminal isn't visible
