MacOS Quick Terminal - Attention Bell fires when terminal has focus

[Kryan90]

Issue Description

When using ghostty quick terminal on MacOS Tahoe I had been noticing I would intermittently see the ghostty icon bouncing in the dock specifically when doing zsh shell tab completions. The behavior is somewhat intermittent. I was able to track down that it was related to the bell-features = attention flag and found that setting it to no-attention stops the behavior, but I would prefer to not have it fully disabled.

After some further investigation, I saw in the docs for that feature Request the user's attention when Ghostty is unfocused, until it has received focus again. and realized the quick term does not count as "being focused." If I have another normal ghostty terminal up that has focus and then hit the quick term hot key, the dock bounce stops.

Expected Behavior

When using the MacOS quick terminal with bell-features = attention the dock icon should not be bouncing when the quick terminal is focused.

Actual Behavior

When only the quick terminal is open and focused, the dock icon is bouncing when doing things like tab completions in the shell. The behavior does not happen inside of a normal ghostty terminal nor does it happen when using the quick terminal with a normal ghostty terminal as the last focused window. Setting bell-features = no-attention disables this behavior in both quick and normal terminals.

Reproduction Steps

1. Open Ghostty
2. Ensure bell-features = attention is set (this is the default)
3. Open the quick terminal
4. Close the normal terminal
5. Select another window (ie. Browser) -- This step is crucial, if the normal terminal was the last thing focused the behavior won't show up even if the terminal has been closed.
6. Open the quick terminal again and try to do something with autocomplete e.g. cat .<tab>
7. Observe dock icon bounce

Ghostty Logs

No response

Ghostty Version

❯ ghostty +version
Ghostty 1.3.1

Version
  - version: 1.3.1
  - channel: stable
Build Config
  - Zig version   : 0.15.2
  - build mode    : .ReleaseFast
  - app runtime   : .none
  - font engine   : .coretext
  - renderer      : renderer.generic.Renderer(renderer.Metal)
  - libxev        : kqueue

OS Version Information

MacOS 26.3.1

(Linux only) Display Server

None

(Linux only) Desktop Environment/Window Manager

No response

Minimal Ghostty Configuration

quick-terminal-autohide = false
keybind = global:cmd+e=toggle_quick_terminal
bell-features = attention

Additional Relevant Configuration

No response

I acknowledge that:

• I have reviewed the FAQ and confirm that my issue is NOT among them.
• I have searched the Ghostty repository (both open and closed Discussions and Issues) and confirm this is not a duplicate of an existing issue or discussion.
• I have checked the "Preview" tab on all text fields to ensure that everything looks right, and have wrapped all configuration and code in code blocks with a group of three backticks (```) on separate lines.