Installing Ghostty via nix-darwin (via nix-homebrew) issues: shell Integration is broken, ghostty cli does not work

[taylrfnt]

I've installed Ghostty on aarch-darwin64 using Nix (specifically, nix-darwin via homebrew, enabled by nix-homebrew).

Upon initial run, most things work fine out of the box - themes, configuration, etc. However, a few key features do not work:

1. Shell integration. I am using zsh, but this does not work for any shell I have tested, and the docs say Ghostty should default to "detect" for my shell
2. ghostty cli. The ghostty cli does not work without specifying the full path to the ghostty binary; a.k.a $GHOSTTY_BIN_DIR/ghostty +<command>. Trying to execute just ghostty +<command> results in command not found error for the shell.

I have a second Mac that I have used vanilla Homebrew (no Nix) to install Ghostty on, and these features work without zero configuration/out-of-box. Help!!!

[taylrfnt]

The TL;DR of this issue is that Nix, nix-darwin, and nix-homebrew integrations are not playing nicely with some of the MacOS system "traditions"/practices - for example, on MacOS every terminal instance is a login shell.

After doing some digging, I found #2832 , which started me on the right path. Comparing between the two Macs I have Ghostty running on, there's two major differences (and perhaps others that I will find and document later):

1. $XDG_DATA_DIRS does not contain $GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR on the machine I have installed Ghostty with nix-homebrew (found thanks to the discussion linked above).
2. $GHOSTTY_BIN_DIR is appended to my $PATH in the Mac I installed via vanilla homebrew, but not on the the machine I have installed Ghostty with nix-homebrew.

To have shell integration and ghostty cli work as expected when using nix-homebrew to install Ghostty, I had to add the following configurations into my nix configurations:

Fixing Shell-Integration
To fix shell integration, $XDG_DATA_DIRSneeds to contain$GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR. You can apply the same fix as in #2832 to address this. In [nix-darwin's environment.variables](https://mynixos.com/nix-darwin/option/environment.variables) option, persist $GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR`:

  environment.variables = {
    # see https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/2832
    XDG_DATA_DIRS = ["/Applications/Ghostty.app/Contents/Resources/ghostty/shell-integration"];
  };

Fixing ghostty cli
To fix the ghostty cli / command not found error, you need to have $GHOSTTY_BIN_DIR in your $PATH.

If you use home-manager, you can add this into home-manager's programs.zsh.initExtra option:

initExtra = ''
    # append ghostty bin to PATH
    export PATH="''${PATH}:''${GHOSTTY_BIN_DIR}"
'';

If you are just sourcing a .zshrc file from a dotfiles directory, you can just add the extra line to your zshrc file:

export PATH="${PATH}:${GHOSTTY_BIN_DIR}"

Rebuilding/Refreshing & Restarting Ghostty
Make sure to rebuild/refresh your configuration as applicable (I use flakes, so I just do a rebuild of my flake), then fully quit & restart Ghostty. Everything should work as expected now! :)

[taylrfnt]

Update while doing some digging on why exactly these issues present themselves
To begin, I am using zsh as my shell, so this may not apply to fish or other shells. Anyway, when reverting some of these changes to perform a source trace, I upgraded to Ghostty 1.0.1.

After the upgrade to 1.0.1, shell integration features now work as expected out of the box (they did not in 1.0.0 for me). I won't say that it will work for everyone since my dev env is not nearly mature enough to test all shells Ghostty supports, but zsh users might be able to get away with not setting up the persistence for $XDG_DATA_DIRS I mentioned above. I removed it from my config, rebuilt my flake, quit/restarted Ghostty, and all shell integration features seem to be working according to their defaults :)

ghostty still flops with a command not found error, so for now I am still manually appending that to my path in my .zshrc (managed via home-manager).