`zig build run` on macOS now builds the app bundle via the `xcodebuild`
CLI and runs it. The experience for running the app is now very similar
to Linux or the prior GLFW build, where the app runs, blocks the zig
command, and logs to the terminal.
`xcodebuild` has its own build cache system that we can't really hook
into so it runs on every `zig build run` command, but it does cache and
I find its actually relatively fast so I think this is a good
replacement for the glfw-based system.
This fixes an Apple Shortcuts crash for macOS 15 and earlier.
Unfortunately it looks like we can't guard these with `@available`. I'm
going to report an Apple Feedback about this but for now this gets
shortcuts working on macOS 15 and earlier.
This is done at the apprt-level for a couple reasons.
(1) For libghostty, we don't have a way to know what the embedding
application is doing, so its risky to create signal handlers that
might overwrite the application's signal handlers.
(2) It's extremely messy to deal with signals and multi-threading.
Apprts have framework access that handles this for us.
For GTK, we use g_unix_signal_add.
For macOS, we use `DispatchSource.makeSignalSource`. This is an awkward
API but made for this purpose.
This changes equalization so it only counts children oriented in the
same direction.
This makes splits a bit more aesthetic, and replicates how split
equalization works in neovim.
Fixes#7647
See #7647 for context. This commit works by extending the `input` work
introduced in #7652 to libghostty so that the macOS can take advantage
of it. At that point, its just the macOS utilizing `input` in order to
set the command and `exit` up similar to Terminal and iTerm2.
This regression may have existed on Sequoia too, but I only saw it on
Tahoe.
The issue is that we should not be setting up titlebar accessory views
when there is no titlebar. This was triggering an AppKit assertion.
To further simplify things, I always use the basic window styling if
window decorations are off, too.
It's here, the long-foretold and long-procrastinated renderer rework!
Hopefully this makes it easier to adapt and modify the renderer in the
future and ensures feature parity between Metal and OpenGL. Despite
having been a lot of work to write initially, with the abstraction layer
in place I feel like working on the renderer will be a much more
pleasant experience going forward.
## Key points
- CPU-side renderer logic is now mostly unified via a generic
`Renderer`.
- A graphics API abstraction layer over OpenGL and Metal has been
introduced.
- Minimum OpenGL version bumped to `4.3`, so can no longer be run on
macOS; I used the nix VM stuff for my testing during development. (Edit
by @mitchellh: Note for readers that Ghostty still works on macOS, but
the OpenGL backend doesn't, only the Metal one)
- The OpenGL backend now supports linear blending! Woohoo! The default
`alpha-blending` has been updated to `linear-corrected` since it's
essentially a strict improvement over `native`. The default on macOS is
still `native` though to match other mac apps in appearance, since macOS
users are more sensitive to text appearance.
- Custom shaders can now be hot reloaded.
- The background color is once again drawn by us, so custom shaders can
interact with it properly. In general, custom shaders should be a little
more robust.
## The abstraction layer
The general hierarchy of the abstraction layer is as such:
```
[ GraphicsAPI ] - Responsible for configuring the runtime surface
| | and providing render `Target`s that draw to it,
| | as well as `Frame`s and `Pipeline`s.
| V
| [ Target ] - Represents an abstract target for rendering, which
| could be a surface directly but is also used as an
| abstraction for off-screen frame buffers.
V
[ Frame ] - Represents the context for drawing a given frame,
| provides `RenderPass`es for issuing draw commands
| to, and reports the frame health when complete.
V
[ RenderPass ] - Represents a render pass in a frame, consisting of
: one or more `Step`s applied to the same target(s),
[ Step ] - - - - each describing the input buffers and textures and
: the vertex/fragment functions and geometry to use.
:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _/
v
[ Pipeline ] - Describes a vertex and fragment function to be used
for a `Step`; the `GraphicsAPI` is responsible for
these and they should be constructed and cached
ahead of time.
[ Buffer ] - An abstraction over a GPU buffer.
[ Texture ] - An abstraction over a GPU texture.
```
More specific documentation can be found on the relevant structures.
## Miscellany
Renderers (which effectively just means the generic renderer) are now
expected to only touch GPU resources in `init`, certain lifecycle
functions such as the `displayRealized`/`displayUnrealized` callbacks
from GTK-- and `drawFrame`; and are also expected to be thread-safe.
This allows the renderer thread to build the CPU-side buffers
(`updateFrame`) even if we can only *draw* from the app thread.
Because of this change, we can draw synchronously from the main thread
on macOS when necessary to always have a frame of the correct size
during a resize animation. This was necessary to allow the background to
be drawn by our GPU code (instead of setting a background color on the
layer) while still avoiding holes during resize.
The OpenGL backend now theoretically has access to multi-buffering, but
it's disabled (by setting the buffer count to 1) because it
synchronously waits for frames to complete anyway which means that the
extra buffers were just a waste of memory.
## Validation
To validate that there are no significant or obvious problems, I
exercised both backends with a variety of configurations, and visually
inspected the results. Everything looks to be in order.
The images are available in a gist here:
https://gist.github.com/qwerasd205/c1bd3e4c694d888e41612e53c0560179
## Memory
Here's a comparison of memory usage for ReleaseFast builds on macOS,
between `main` and this branch.
Memory figures given are values from Activity Monitor measuring windows
of the same size, with two tabs with 3 splits each.
||Before|After|
|-:|-|-|
|**Memory**|247.9 MB|224.2 MB|
|**Real Memory**|174.4 MB|172.5 MB|
Happily, the rework has slightly *reduced* the memory footprint- likely
due to removing the overhead of `CAMetalLayer`. (The footprint could be
reduced much further if we got rid of multi-buffering and satisfied
ourselves with blocking for each frame, but that's a discussion for
another day.)
If someone could do a similar comparison for Linux, that'd be much
appreciated!
## Notes / future work
- There are a couple structures that *can* be unified using the
abstraction layer, but I haven't gotten around to unifying yet.
Specifically, in `renderer/(opengl|metal)/`, there's `cell.zig` and
`image.zig`, both of which are substantially identical between the two
backends. `shaders.zig` may also be a candidate for unification, but
that might be *overly* DRY.
- ~~I did not double-check the documentation for config options, which
may mention whether certain options can be hot-reloaded; if it does then
that will need to be updated.~~ Fixed: be5908f
- The `fragCoord` for custom shaders originates at the top left for
Metal, but *bottom* left for OpenGL; fixing this will be a bit annoying,
since the screen texture is likewise vertically flipped between the two.
Some shaders rely on the fragcoord for things like falling particles, so
this does need to be fixed.
- `Target` should be improved to support multiple types of targets right
now it only represents a framebuffer or iosurface, but it should also be
able to represent a texture; right now a kind of messy tagged union is
used so that steps can accept both.
- Custom shader cursor uniforms (#6912) and terminal background images
(#4226, #5233) should be much more straightforward to implement on top
of this rework, and I plan to make follow-up PRs for them once this is
merged.
- I *do* want to do a rework of the pipelines themselves, since the way
we're rendering stuff is a bit messy currently, but this is already a
huge enough PR as it is- so for now the renderer still uses the same
rendering passes that Metal did before.
- We should probably add a system requirements section to the README
where we can note the minimum required OpenGL version of `4.3`, any even
slightly modern Linux system will support this, but it would be good to
document it somewhere user-facing anyway.
# TODO BEFORE MERGE
- [x] Have multiple people test this on both macOS and linux.
- [ ] ~~Have someone with a better dev setup on linux check for memory
leaks and other problems.~~ (Skipped, will merge and let tip users
figure this out, someone should *specifically* look for memory leaks
before the next versioned release though.)
- [x] Address any code review feedback.
This updates the Ghostty icon to be compatible with macOS Tahoe
(supports glass effects, light/dark, tinting, etc.). This icon is made
in the new Apple Icon Composer as the source format, and all other
formats are exported from it.
This commit also updates the icon for non-Apple platforms because the
icon is fundamentally the same and I don't see any reason to maintain
multiple icons of fundamentally the same design and style.
This commit also includes updates to the macOS app so that the About
Window and so on will use the new icon.
This commit is very large, representing about a month of work with many
interdependent changes that don't separate cleanly in to atomic commits.
The main change here is unifying the renderer logic to a single generic
renderer, implemented on top of an abstraction layer over OpenGL/Metal.
I'll write a more complete summary of the changes in the description of
the PR.
This fixes an issue where pressing the red close button in a window or
the "x" button on a tab couldn't differentiate and would always close
the tab or close the window (depending on tab counts).
It seems like in both cases, AppKit triggers the `windowShouldClose`
delegate method on the controller, but for the close window case it
triggers this on ALL the windows in the group, not just the one that was
clicked.
I implemented a kind of silly coordinator that debounces
`windowShouldClose` calls over 100ms and uses that to differentiate
between the two cases.
This fixes an issue where pressing the red close button in a window or
the "x" button on a tab couldn't differentiate and would always close
the tab or close the window (depending on tab counts).
It seems like in both cases, AppKit triggers the `windowShouldClose`
delegate method on the controller, but for the close window case it
triggers this on ALL the windows in the group, not just the one
that was clicked.
I implemented a kind of silly coordinator that debounces
`windowShouldClose` calls over 100ms and uses that to differentiate
between the two cases.
Resolves#7591
This moves our CI to build macOS on Sequoia (macOS 15) with Xcode 26,
including the new macOS 26 beta SDK.
Importantly, this will make our builds on macOS 26 use the new styling.
I've added a new job that ensures we can continue to build with Xcode 16 and
the macOS 15 SDK, as well, although I think that might come to an end
when we switch over to an IconComposer-based icon. I'll verify then. For
now, we continue to support both.
I've also removed our `hasLiquidGlass` check, since this will now always
be true for macOS 26 builds.
This integrates with macOS accessibility APIs to expose Ghostty terminal
structure and content.
This is a very, very bare implementation and the terminal contents
currently reported are the _full screen and scrollback_ which is way too
much for realistic human accessibility use. The target use case for this
PR is to enable automated tooling (namely, AI screen readers). However,
this is all groundwork we'll need to iterate and improve the
accessibility work anyways.
To make this work, I also replatformed some of our hacky C APIs onto a
more robust `ghostty_surface_read_text` API that can now read arbitrary
ranges of the screen into C strings for consumers to use. This will be
useful in more places going forward (hint hint).
## Before
Accessibility tooling can't read anything, Ghostty has no attributes, no
contents, just shows up as a square.

## After
A lot of metadata, including the screen contents as text.

Also, split hierarchies are navigable:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a7b2ffb7-dbeb-41b2-8705-9c3200812c4d
This fixes a regression from our Tahoe window styling changes on
earlier, stable versions of macOS. We need to set
"titlebarAppearsTransparent" to true in order to hide the bottom
border.