Ghostty Cursor Trails

Animated trail-effect for the text cursor in Ghostty terminal.

This repository features shaders designed to make it easier to track rapid cursor movement in your terminal and editors like Neovim. Reminiscent of the classic Neovide, these shaders are tuned to feel snappy and to the point. ;)

Boo is the least tweakable shader. Tinkle is more powerful and provides a nice configuration section. Wisp is a configured version of Tinkle (and the author's recommendation).

Boo

boo-cursor.mp4

Tinkle

tinkle-cursor.mp4

Note

If you are using the Line cursor (default in Ghostty), the effects from this shader will freeze when you unfocus the terminal as the cursor becomes a hollow block). You can prevent this by adding custom-shader-animation = always in your Ghostty config.

Usage

1. Clone the repo into your ~/.config/ghostty/shaders directory:

git clone https://github.com/hced/ghostty-cursor-trails ~/.config/ghostty/shaders

2. Enable it by adding this line in your ~/.config/ghostty/config:

custom-shader = shaders/ghostty-cursor-trails/boo-cursor.glsl
# ...

3. Activate it by running this command line (Linux; use equivalent command for macOS/Windows):

systemctl reload --user app-com.mitchellh.ghostty.service  # reload Ghostty config

Acknowledgements

Inspired by Neovide cursor animations and partly derived from ghostty-cursor-shaders (Boo-Cursor).

License

MIT