This deletes the GLFW apprt from the Ghostty codebase.
The GLFW apprt was the original apprt used by Ghostty (well, before
Ghostty even had the concept of an "apprt" -- it was all just a single
application then). It let me iterate on the core terminal features,
rendering, etc. without bothering about the UI. It was a good way to get
started. But it has long since outlived its usefulness.
We've had a stable GTK apprt for Linux (and Windows via WSL) and a
native macOS app via libghostty for awhile now. The GLFW apprt only
remained within the tree for a few reasons:
1. Primarily, it provided a faster feedback loop on macOS because
building the macOS app historically required us to hop out of the
zig build system and into Xcode, which is slow and cumbersome.
2. It was a convenient way to narrow whether a bug was in the
core Ghostty codebase or in the apprt itself. If a bug was in both
the glfw and macOS app then it was likely in the core.
3. It provided us a way on macOS to test OpenGL.
All of these reasons are no longer valid. Respectively:
1. Our Zig build scripts now execute the `xcodebuild` CLI directly and
can open the resulting app, stream logs, etc. This is the same
experience we have on Linux. (Xcode has always been a dependency of
building on macOS in general, so this is not cumbersome.)
2. We have a healthy group of maintainers, many of which have access
to both macOS and Linux, so we can quickly narrow down bugs
regardless of the apprt.
3. Our OpenGL renderer hasn't been compatible with macOS for some time
now, so this is no longer a useful feature.
At this point, the GLFW apprt is just a burden. It adds complexity
across the board, and some people try to run Ghostty with it in the real
world and get confused when it doesn't work (it's always been lacking in
features and buggy compared to the other apprts).
So, it's time to say goodbye. Its bittersweet because it is a big part
of Ghostty's history, but we've grown up now and it's time to move on.
Thank you, goodbye.
(NOTE: If you are a user of the GLFW apprt, then please fork the project
prior to this commit or start a new project based on it. We've warned
against using it for a very, very long time now.)
We default system-integration to true as this is a shared library that
must be installed on a library path and it is recommended to use the
system package.
If the system does not package gtk4-layer-shell then doing `zig build
-fno-sys` will now correctly build and install the shared library under
a lib/ subdirectory of the output prefix.
The output prefix should be a default library path (`/lib`, `/usr/lib`,
or a lib64 variant) otherwise a custom library path can be configured
using ldconfig (see `man ld.so 8`)
This replaces #7433. The improvements are:
1) Install the systemd user service in the proper directory depending
on if it's a 'user' install or a 'system' install. This is controlled
either by using the `--system` build flag (as most packages will) or by
the `-Dsystem-package` flag.
2) Add the absolute path to the `ghostty` binary in the application
file, the DBus service, and the systemd user service. This is done so
that they do not depend on `ghostty` being in the `PATH` of whatever
is launching Ghostty. That `PATH` is not necessarily the same as the
`PATH` in a user shell (especially for DBus activation and systemd user
services).
3) Adjust the DBus bus name that is expected by the system depending on
the optimization level that Ghostty is compiled with.
Fixes#6821
UTF8 translation using KeymapDarwin requires a buffer and the buffer was
stack allocated in the coreKeyEvent call and returned from the function.
We need the buffer to live longer than this.
Long term, we're removing KeymapDarwin (there is a whole TODO comment in
there about how to do it), but this fixes a real problem today.
Closes#6702
This removes our mach-glfw dependency and replaces it with an in-tree
pkg/glfw that includes both the source for compiling glfw as well as the
Zig bindings. This matches the pattern from our other packages.
This is based on the upstream mach-glfw work and therefore includes the
original license and copyright information.
The reasoning is stated in the issue but to summarize for the commit:
- mach-glfw is no longer maintained, so we have to take ownership
- mach-glfw depended on some large blobs of header files to enable
cross-compilation but this isn't something we actually care about,
so we can (and do) drop the blobs
- mach-glfw blobs were hosted on mach hosts. given mach-glfw is
unmaintained, we can't rely on this hosting
- mach-glfw relied on a "glfw" package which was owned by another
person to be Zig 0.14 compatible, but we no longer need to rely on
this
- mach-glfw builds were outdated based on latest Zig practices
As of now `gtk4-layer-shell` is unavailable on recent, stable releases
of many distros (Debian 12, Ubuntu 24.04, openSUSE Leap & Tumbleweed, etc.)
and outdated on many others (Nixpkgs 24.11/unstable, Fedora 41, etc.)
This is inconvenient for our users and severely limits where the quick
terminal can be used. As a result we then build gtk4-layer-shell ourselves
by default unless `--system` or `-fsys=gtk4-layer-shell` are specified.
This also allows me to add an idiomatic Zig API on top of the library
and avoiding adding even more raw C code in the GTK apprt.
Since we now build gtk4-layer-shell it should be theoretically available
on all Linux systems we target. As such, the `-Dgtk-layer-shell` build
option has been removed. This is somewhat of an experimental change as
I don't know if gtk4-layer-shell works perfectly across all distros, and
we can always add the option back if need be.
Using `gtk4-layer-shell` still seems like the path of least resistance,
and to my delight it pretty much Just Works. Hurrah!
This implementation could do with some further polish (e.g. animations,
which can be implemented via libadwaita's animations API, and global
shortcuts), but as a MVP it works well enough.
It even supports tabs!
Fixes#4624.
The major idea behind the refactor is to split the `build.zig` file up into
distinct `src/build/*.zig` files. By doing so, we can improve readability of
the primary `build.zig` while also enabling better reuse of steps. Our
`build.zig` is now less than 150 lines of code (of course, it calls into a lot
more lines but they're neatly organized now).
Improvements:
* `build.zig` is less than 150 lines of readable code.
* Help strings and unicode table generators are only run once when multiple
artifacts are built since the results are the same regardless of target.
* Metal lib is only built once per architecture (rather than once per artifact)
* Resources (shell integration, terminfo, etc.) and docs are only
built/installed for artifacts that need them
Breaking changes:
* Removed broken wasm build (@gabydd will re-add)
* Removed conformance files, shell scripts are better and we don't run
these anymore
* Removed macOS app bundle creation, we don't use this anymore since we
use Xcode
## Some History
Our `build.zig` hasn't been significantly refactored since the project started,
when Zig was _version 0.10_. Since then, the build system has changed
significantly. We've only ever duct taped the `build.zig` as we needed to
support new Zig versions, new features, etc. It was a mess.
The major improvement is adapting the entire Ghostty `build.zig` to the Step
and LazyPath changes introduced way back in Zig 0.12. This lets us better take
advantage of parallelism and the dependency graph so that steps are only
executed as they're needed.
As such, you can see in the build.zig that we initialize a lot of things, but
unless a final target (i.e. install, run) references those steps, _they'll
never be executed_. This lets us clean up a lot.
