Ghostty's AppleScript support replaced my tmux habit

iTerm2

I've used iTerm2 for as long as I can remember — probably since the first day I owned a Mac. It has a lot of features I love: triggers, smart selection, and a look far nicer than Terminal.app's at the time.

But over the years it's grown bulky, and I've tried plenty of alternatives — Kitty, Alacritty, Warp, you name it. Each is better than iTerm2 in some way, but none made me switch, because I have one very specific need that only iTerm2 met. Let me explain.

Always in tmux

First, I like to always work inside tmux. I even have this in my .zshrc:

if [[ -z "$TMUX" ]]; then
    exec tmux new-session -AD -s main
fi

so that every new terminal drops me straight into tmux.

Capture pane

Beyond the obvious continuity — I never lose a session by accidentally closing the terminal — the one tmux feature I lean on most is capture-pane.

So often I want to capture the output of a command after I've already run it. Eventually I landed on this:

tmux capture-pane -pS - | pick-cmd

pick-cmd is a script I wrote: it reads from stdin, parses command boundaries (by looking for my custom starship prompt as the delimiter), presents them in fzf, and prints the selected command blocks to stdout. Very convenient.

iTerm2 profiles

But always staying inside tmux has a downside: ssh-ing into other hosts becomes a nuisance, because I also auto-attach to tmux on remote machines.

Run ssh remote-host from inside a local tmux session and I'd end up with tmux inside ssh inside tmux.

That's where iTerm2 profiles came to the rescue. I could set up a remote-host profile that runs ssh remote-host as the command, instead of launching my normal login shell and triggering the local tmux auto-attach. Problem solved.

Ghostty's AppleScript support

For all the emulators I'd tried, none could cover my iTerm2-profiles workflow — until Ghostty came along.

Plenty about Ghostty won me over before I even got to the niche feature I needed: it's fast, it's genuinely pretty out of the box, it has a built-in quick (drop-down) terminal, and it's configured through a plain text file I can keep in version control instead of clicking through a preferences pane. That last point alone is a breath of fresh air after years of iTerm2's settings UI.

Ghostty doesn't have iTerm2-style profiles in the way I used them. But it solves the problem from the other direction: it offers the capture functionality I need through AppleScript:

tell application "Ghostty"
    set t to focused terminal of selected tab of front window
    perform action "write_screen_file:copy" on t
end tell

That, together with Ghostty's shell integration, means I finally don't have to live inside tmux for local sessions — it warns me before I close a pane with a command still running, and on a local machine there's no flaky connection to drop in the first place.

And that's what dissolves the whole problem. The only reason I ever needed profiles was that I lived in tmux locally, so ssh-ing out stacked yet another tmux on top. Take tmux out of my local sessions and that nesting never happens — no profiles required. I still use tmux when I ssh out, which is why I wrote this wrapper.

Final picture

So here's where I've landed: Ghostty for everything local, no tmux unless I ssh out. The one feature I couldn't give up — capturing a command's output after I've already run it — came with me; it just runs through AppleScript now instead of tmux.

After all these years, I didn't expect an AppleScript hook to be the thing that finally moved me off iTerm2. But that was the missing piece — and once it clicked, the switch was easy.