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 for running applications such as first-class TUI primitives (layouts, panels, tables, etc.).

ghostty is purposely minimal and provides no multi-window or tabbing support; it is expected to be used with something like a tiling window manager. Long term, we want to add support for a richer native GUI experience, especially for macOS and Windows.

There are a number of excellent terminal emulator options that exist today. ghostty isn't trying to claim to be the best in every category 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.

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)	❌

Languages

Zig 80.7%

Swift 10.4%

C 6.2%

Shell 0.7%

C++ 0.5%

Other 1.2%