After giving up on Ghostty on this machine, I uninstalled it. The removal itself is one command, but checking that it actually happened turned up the parts of the Debian package lifecycle that are easy to skip past: the difference between removing and purging, and the package states dpkg reports along the way. This post walks through it with the real outputs from that removal.

Finding out how the package was installed

Removal starts with knowing what installed the file you can see:

$ which ghostty
/usr/bin/ghostty
$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/ghostty
ghostty: /usr/bin/ghostty
$ apt list --installed 2>/dev/null | grep ghostty
ghostty/now 1.3.1-0~ppa2 amd64 [installed,local]

dpkg -S maps a file back to the package that owns it, so this is a real apt/dpkg package, not a manually copied binary or a snap.1 The [installed,local] marker says the package is installed but no configured repository offers it anymore — the PPA it came from is no longer in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/, so apt considers it a local package with no update source.

Before removing, the package shows in dpkg’s database like this:

$ dpkg -l ghostty | tail -1
ii  ghostty        1.3.1-0~ppa2 amd64        Fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator.

The two letters at the start are the package state. The first letter is the desired state — what you asked for — and the second is the current state. ii means desired “install”, currently “installed”: the normal state of an installed package.2

Remove

$ sudo apt remove ghostty

apt remove deletes the package’s files but keeps its conffiles — configuration files, typically under /etc, that dpkg tracks so your edits survive upgrades and reinstalls.3 Keeping them on removal is deliberate: if you reinstall the package later, your configuration is still there.

Confirm

Two checks. First, the binary is gone:

$ which ghostty
$

Second, the state in dpkg’s database changed:

$ dpkg -l ghostty | tail -1
rc  ghostty        1.3.1-0~ppa2 amd64        Fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator.

rc reads as desired “remove”, currently “config-files”: the package is removed, but its conffiles are still on disk and dpkg still has a record of it.2 This is why a removed package keeps appearing in dpkg -l output — the entry is not a leftover installation, just the retained configuration. dpkg -L ghostty lists exactly which files remain.

Purge

To drop the conffiles and the database record too:

$ sudo apt purge ghostty

Purge works both on installed packages (it removes and purges in one step) and on packages already in the rc state. Afterward the package is gone from the database entirely:

$ dpkg -l ghostty
dpkg-query: no packages found matching ghostty

That is the end state: no files, no conffiles, no record.

If the package pulled in dependencies nothing else uses, sudo apt autoremove clears those as well; apt prints the candidates at the end of the remove step.

What the package manager will not clean

Everything above covers only files the package installed. Debian packages do not write to home directories, so anything the application or you created there stays after a purge. For Ghostty on this machine that was:

  • ~/.config/ghostty/ — the application’s own configuration
  • ~/.local/share/applications/com.mitchellh.ghostty.desktop — a user-level desktop entry I had added to override the launch command
  • an alias ghostty=... line in ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc

The generic checklist after purging a package: its directory under ~/.config/ and ~/.local/share/, caches under ~/.cache/, aliases or environment variables in shell rc files, and — if you added one for the package — the repository entry under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/.

A final check that nothing is left:

$ which ghostty
$ dpkg -l ghostty
dpkg-query: no packages found matching ghostty
$ grep -ri ghostty ~/.bashrc ~/.zshrc ~/.config ~/.local/share/applications
$

References

  1. dpkg(1) — -S (search for a filename in installed packages), -l (list packages), -L (list a package’s files). The listing and searching are done by dpkg-query(1), which dpkg calls for these options. ↩

  2. The state abbreviations are documented in dpkg(1) under -l: the first character is the desired action (install, remove, purge, hold), the second the package status (installed, config-files, not-installed, and others). dpkg -l prints a header decoding both columns. ↩ ↩2

  3. apt(8) and apt-get(8) define remove (keep configuration) versus purge (remove everything). Conffile handling — which files qualify and how modified ones are preserved — is Debian Policy, chapter 10.7. ↩