ghostty
GPU-accelerated terminal emulator pushing modern features.
About
ghostty is a cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator that aims to push the boundaries of what is possible with a terminal emulator by exposing modern, opt-in features that enable CLI tool developers to build more feature rich, interactive applications.
There are a number of excellent terminal emulator options that exist today. The unique goal of ghostty is to have a platform for experimenting with modern, optional, non-standards-compliant features to enhance the capabilities of CLI applications. We aim to be the best in this category, and competitive in the rest.
While aiming for this ambitious goal, ghostty is a fully standards compliant terminal emulator that aims to remain compatible with all existing shells and software. You can use this as a drop-in replacement for your existing terminal emulator.
Project Status: Pre-Alpha. It now supports enough to be used day to day for my use case, but is still missing a lot of functionality.
Roadmap and Status
The high-level ambitious plan for the project, in order:
| # | Step | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Standards-compliant terminal emulation | ⚠️ |
| 2 | Competitive rendering performance (not the fastest, but fast enough) | ✅ |
| 3 | Basic customizability -- fonts, bg colors, etc. | ❌ |
| 4 | Richer windowing features -- multi-window, tabbing, panes | ❌ |
| 5 | Optimal rendering performance | ❌ |
| N | Fancy features (to be expanded upon later) | ❌ |
Standards-Compliant Terminal Emulation
I am able to use this terminal as a daily driver. I think that's good enough for a yellow status. There are a LOT of missing features for full standards compliance but the set that are regularly in use are working pretty well.
Competitive Rendering Performance
I want to automate the testing of this, but for now I've manually verified
we can maintain 120fps cat-ing a 6MB file. In terms of raw draw speed,
cat-ing a 6MB file is consistently faster on Linux using ghostty than
any other terminal emulator currently.
On macOS, cat-ing the large file is acceptable performance but not optimal.
I don't know why and need to look into it.
Developing Ghostty
Ghostty is built using both the Zig programming
language as well as the Zig build system. At a minimum, Zig must be installed.
For Nix users, a shell.nix is available which includes
all the necessary dependencies pinned to exact versions.
Note: Zig nightly is required. Ghostty is built against the nightly releases of Zig. The latest released version (0.9.1 at the time of this edit) will NOT work. You can find binary releases of nightly builds on the Zig downloads page.
With Zig installed, a binary can be built using zig build:
$ zig build
...
$ zig-out/bin/ghostty
This will build a binary for the currently running system (if supported).
You can cross compile by setting -Dtarget=<target-triple>. For example,
zig build -Dtarget=aarch64-macos will build for Apple Silicon macOS. Note
that not all targets supported by Zig are supported.
Other useful commands:
zig build testfor running unit tests.zig build run -Dconformance=<name>run a conformance test case from theconformancedirectory. Thenameis the name of the file. This runs in the current running terminal emulator so if you want to check the behavior of this project, you must run this command in ghostty.