They explain it a bit here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-patterns
Also, calling out the warning signs, my bar for a native platform experience is that the app feels and acts like a purpose-built native app. I don’t think this bar is unreasonable. For example, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that Alacritty is kind of not native because new windows create new processes. Or that Kitty is kind of not native because tabs use a non-native widget. And so on (there are many more examples for each).
So nothing wrong with Kitty on MacOS e.g., but the “feel” is not native. Personally don’t care too much about that, but the author seems to do.
This smells like bullshit because it’s just based on things users do not see (processes) or do not care about (the style used for your tabs).
Yeah I agree the table is very odd, but the project looks awesome anyway. Some users may care about things using native widgets when it comes to theming and stuff, though I wouldn’t even know what I’d call “native” on Linux. Is GTK native? Qt?
He seems to target GTK based on his statement:
"On macOS, the main GUI experience is written in Swift using AppKit and SwiftUI. The tabs are native tabs, the splits are native UI components, multi-window works as you’d expect, etc. On Linux, the GUI experience is GTK using real GTK windows and other widgets.
Features such as error messages are not implemented with a specialized terminal view, we actually use real native UI components. The point is, while the terminal surface and core logic is cross-platform, the user interaction is all purpose-built for each operating system for a true native experience."
https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-patterns
