Setting Up CJK Fonts in Ghostty on macOS

The Gungseo Surprise

When you install Ghostty and type Korean text in the terminal, you'll encounter a familiar yet startling font.

Gungseo — a traditional Korean calligraphy-style font.

English text looks clean, but the moment you type Korean, it feels like a time warp to the Joseon dynasty. This happens because Ghostty can't find Korean glyphs and falls back to macOS's system fallback font — Gungseo.

The same applies to Japanese and Chinese. It's a CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) problem in general.

Installing Noto Sans Mono CJK KR

Noto Sans Mono CJK KR, made by Google, is a monospaced font that supports all CJK characters. Perfect for terminal use.

You can install it easily with Homebrew.

brew install --cask font-noto-sans-mono-cjk-kr

If you can see "Noto Sans Mono CJK KR" in Font Book after installation, you're good to go.

Configuring Ghostty

Open Settings... (Cmd + ,) from the Ghostty menu to open the config file (~/.config/ghostty/config).

Add the following to the config file.

font-family = "Noto Sans Mono CJK KR"

If you already have a preferred font for English text, you can specify font-family multiple times to create a fallback chain. Ghostty moves to the next font when it can't find a glyph in the first one.

font-family = "Menlo"
font-family = "Noto Sans Mono CJK KR"

This way, English text renders with Menlo, and Korean text renders with Noto Sans Mono CJK KR.

Mapping Specific Unicode Ranges

For more fine-grained control, you can use font-codepoint-map to directly specify Korean Unicode ranges.

font-family = "Menlo"
font-codepoint-map = "U+AC00-U+D7AF=Noto Sans Mono CJK KR"

U+AC00-U+D7AF covers the Hangul Syllables range. To include Hangul Jamo as well, add these:

font-codepoint-map = "U+1100-U+11FF=Noto Sans Mono CJK KR"
font-codepoint-map = "U+3130-U+318F=Noto Sans Mono CJK KR"
font-codepoint-map = "U+AC00-U+D7AF=Noto Sans Mono CJK KR"

In most cases, the font-family fallback approach is sufficient.

Applying the Settings

After saving the config file, select Reload Configuration (Cmd + Shift + ,) from the Ghostty menu to apply changes without restarting. Of course, restarting Ghostty works too.

Gungseo is gone, replaced by a clean gothic font. The terminal becomes much more readable.

Adjusting Font Size

If the size balance between Korean and English text feels off, try adjusting font-size.

font-size = 14

Decimal values are supported, so fine-tuning like font-size = 13.5 is possible.

Summary