Fixing xterm-ghostty: unknown terminal type

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you use Ghostty as your terminal on macOS and SSH into remote Linux servers, you’ve probably seen this:

root@server:~# clear
'xterm-ghostty': unknown terminal type.

Or this:

missing or unsuitable terminal: xterm-ghostty

This happens to everyone who uses Ghostty with remote servers. Here’s why it happens and how to fix it properly.

Why This Happens

Ghostty ships with its own terminfo entry called xterm-ghostty. When you open a terminal, Ghostty sets TERM=xterm-ghostty in your local shell. When you SSH into a remote server, that TERM value gets forwarded. The remote server then looks up xterm-ghostty in its terminfo database – and finds nothing, because xterm-ghostty is not in any standard Linux distribution yet.

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Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Anurag.

By day I’m somewhere in the infrastructure stack — automating things, breaking things, putting them back together a little better. By night the same energy goes into the homelab humming under my desk.

The pull is mostly the same across both: I like systems I can understand all the way down. The satisfaction of ssh into a box I own, watching containers start, knowing exactly what touches what. The patience to read a man page instead of guessing. The instinct to script the thing the second time it annoys me.

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Fixing xterm-ghostty: unknown terminal type

Why This Happens

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