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. This project is not ready to be used as a day-to-day terminal emulator. It can't even render vim yet!
Roadmap
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) | ❌ |
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.
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.