My Ghostty config on macOS

I wrote about switching to Ghostty about a year ago. Since then I settled on a config that removes all unnecessary decorations and gives me the most terminal space possible. Here is the full thing.

The config

# Theme - auto-switches with macOS appearance
theme = light:Catppuccin Latte,dark:Catppuccin Frappe

# Shell
shell-integration = zsh

# Shift+Enter sends literal newline (useful in editors)
keybind = shift+enter=text:\n

# Remove titlebar and rounded corners for max terminal space
window-decoration = false

# Distribute leftover pixels evenly instead of dumping at bottom
window-padding-balance = true

# Use Ghostty's own fullscreen instead of native macOS animation
macos-non-native-fullscreen = true

# Left Option key acts as Alt (needed for helix/tmux keybinds)
macos-option-as-alt = left

# Auto-copy selected text to clipboard (handy with tmux)
copy-on-select = clipboard

# Hide cursor while typing to reduce visual noise
mouse-hide-while-typing = true

Most of it is self-explanatory, but a few notes.

window-decoration = false removes the titlebar and the rounded corners. This gives you the maximum terminal space. I do not need the titlebar since I run Ghostty fullscreen most of the time anyway.

window-padding-balance = true distributes leftover pixels evenly across the window. Without it, any extra space gets dumped at the bottom, which looks off.

macos-option-as-alt = left makes the left Option key behave as Alt. Without this, keybindings in Helix and tmux that use Alt simply do not work on macOS.

keybind = shift+enter=text:\n makes Shift+Enter send a literal newline. I mainly use this with Claude Code in the terminal, where Shift+Enter inserts a new line instead of submitting the prompt.

copy-on-select = clipboard copies selected text to the clipboard automatically. Useful with tmux where selecting text should just work without extra steps.

Auto-start tmux

I also added this to my ~/.zshrc to automatically start (or reattach to) a tmux session when opening Ghostty:

if command -v tmux &>/dev/null && [ -z "$TMUX" ]; then
  tmux new-session -A -s main
fi

It checks if tmux is installed and if you are not already inside a tmux session. If both are true, it creates a new session called main or reattaches to it if it already exists. This way Ghostty always opens straight into tmux.

Screenshot