ghostty README

The project's README from github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty. As one markdown file: README.md.

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Ghostty

Fast, native, feature-rich terminal emulator pushing modern features.
A native GUI or embeddable library via libghostty.
About · Download · Documentation · Contributing · Developing

About

Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.

libghostty is a cross-platform, zero-dependency C and Zig library for building terminal emulators or utilizing terminal functionality (such as style parsing). Anyone can use libghostty to build a terminal emulator or embed a terminal into their own applications. See Ghostling for a minimal complete project example or the examples directory for smaller examples of using libghostty in C and Zig.

For more details, see About Ghostty.

Download

See the download page on the Ghostty website.

Documentation

See the documentation on the Ghostty website.

Contributing and Developing

If you have any ideas, issues, etc. regarding Ghostty, or would like to contribute to Ghostty through pull requests, please check out our "Contributing to Ghostty" document. Those who would like to get involved with Ghostty's development as well should also read the "Developing Ghostty" document for more technical details.

Roadmap and Status

Ghostty is stable and in use by millions of people and machines daily.

The high-level ambitious plan for the project, in order:

# Step Status
1 Standards-compliant terminal emulation ✅
2 Competitive performance ✅
3 Rich windowing features -- multi-window, tabbing, panes ✅
4 Native Platform Experiences ✅
5 Cross-platform libghostty for Embeddable Terminals ✅
6 Ghostty-only Terminal Control Sequences ❌

Additional details for each step in the big roadmap below:

Standards-Compliant Terminal Emulation

Ghostty implements all of the regularly used control sequences and can run every mainstream terminal program without issue. For legacy sequences, we've done a comprehensive xterm audit comparing Ghostty's behavior to xterm and building a set of conformance test cases.

In addition to legacy sequences (what you'd call real "terminal" emulation), Ghostty also supports more modern sequences than almost any other terminal emulator. These features include things like the Kitty graphics protocol, Kitty image protocol, clipboard sequences, synchronized rendering, light/dark mode notifications, and many, many more.

We believe Ghostty is one of the most compliant and feature-rich terminal emulators available.

Terminal behavior is partially a de jure standard (i.e. ECMA-48) but mostly a de facto standard as defined by popular terminal emulators worldwide. Ghostty takes the approach that our behavior is defined by (1) standards, if available, (2) xterm, if the feature exists, (3) other popular terminals, in that order. This defines what the Ghostty project views as a "standard."

Competitive Performance

Ghostty is generally in the same performance category as the other highest performing terminal emulators.

"The same performance category" means that Ghostty is much faster than traditional or "slow" terminals and is within an unnoticeable margin of the well-known "fast" terminals. For example, Ghostty and Alacritty are usually within a few percentage points of each other on various benchmarks, but are both something like 100x faster than Terminal.app and iTerm. However, Ghostty is much more feature rich than Alacritty and has a much more native app experience.

This performance is achieved through high-level architectural decisions and low-level optimizations. At a high-level, Ghostty has a multi-threaded architecture with a dedicated read thread, write thread, and render thread per terminal. Our renderer uses OpenGL on Linux and Metal on macOS. Our read thread has a heavily optimized terminal parser that leverages CPU-specific SIMD instructions. Etc.

Rich Windowing Features

The Mac and Linux (build with GTK) apps support multi-window, tabbing, and splits with additional features such as tab renaming, coloring, etc. These features allow for a higher degree of organization and customization than single-window terminals.

Native Platform Experiences

Ghostty is a cross-platform terminal emulator but we don't aim for a least-common-denominator experience. There is a large, shared core written in Zig but we do a lot of platform-native things:

Our goal with Ghostty is for users of whatever platform they run Ghostty on to think that Ghostty was built for their platform first and maybe even exclusively. We want Ghostty to feel like a native app on every platform, for the best definition of "native" on each platform.

Cross-platform libghostty for Embeddable Terminals

In addition to being a standalone terminal emulator, Ghostty is a C-compatible library for embedding a fast, feature-rich terminal emulator in any 3rd party project. This library is called libghostty.

Due to the scope of this project, we're breaking libghostty down into separate libraries, starting with libghostty-vt. The goal of this project is to focus on parsing terminal sequences and maintaining terminal state. This is covered in more detail in this blog post.

libghostty-vt is already available and usable today for Zig and C and is compatible for macOS, Linux, Windows, and WebAssembly. The functionality is extremely stable (since its been proven in Ghostty GUI for a long time), but the API signatures are still in flux.

libghostty is already heavily in use. See examples for small examples of using libghostty in C and Zig or the Ghostling project for a complete example. See awesome-libghostty for a list of projects and resources related to libghostty.

We haven't tagged libghostty with a version yet and we're still working on a better docs experience, but our Doxygen website is a good resource for the C API.

Ghostty-only Terminal Control Sequences

We want and believe that terminal applications can and should be able to do so much more. We've worked hard to support a wide variety of modern sequences created by other terminal emulators towards this end, but we also want to fill the gaps by creating our own sequences.

We've been hesitant to do this up until now because we don't want to create more fragmentation in the terminal ecosystem by creating sequences that only work in Ghostty. But, we do want to balance that with the desire to push the terminal forward with stagnant standards and the slow pace of change in the terminal ecosystem.

We haven't done any of this yet.

Crash Reports

Ghostty has a built-in crash reporter that will generate and save crash reports to disk. The crash reports are saved to the $XDG_STATE_HOME/ghostty/crash directory. If $XDG_STATE_HOME is not set, the default is ~/.local/state. Crash reports are not automatically sent anywhere off your machine.

Crash reports are only generated the next time Ghostty is started after a crash. If Ghostty crashes and you want to generate a crash report, you must restart Ghostty at least once. You should see a message in the log that a crash report was generated.

[!NOTE]

Use the ghostty +crash-report CLI command to get a list of available crash reports. A future version of Ghostty will make the contents of the crash reports more easily viewable through the CLI and GUI.

Crash reports end in the .ghosttycrash extension. The crash reports are in Sentry envelope format. You can upload these to your own Sentry account to view their contents, but the format is also publicly documented so any other available tools can also be used. The ghostty +crash-report CLI command can be used to list any crash reports. A future version of Ghostty will show you the contents of the crash report directly in the terminal.

To send the crash report to the Ghostty project, you can use the following CLI command using the Sentry CLI:

SENTRY_DSN=https://e914ee84fd895c4fe324afa3e53dac76@o4507352570920960.ingest.us.sentry.io/4507850923638784 sentry-cli send-envelope --raw <path to ghostty crash>

[!WARNING]

The crash report can contain sensitive information. The report doesn't purposely contain sensitive information, but it does contain the full stack memory of each thread at the time of the crash. This information is used to rebuild the stack trace but can also contain sensitive data depending on when the crash occurred.

ghostty (ghostty-org/ghostty)

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Ghostty
What is this?Ghostty is a terminal emulator built around ending the usual trade-off: the README says other emulators force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs, and Ghostty provides all three.
Is it just an app, or can developers build on it too?Both: it is a standalone native terminal app, and libghostty is a zero-dependency C and Zig library for building your own terminal emulator or embedding terminal functionality.
Where do I get the app?The README points straight to the download page on the Ghostty website for builds; the documentation lives on the same site.
How ready is libghostty if I want to embed a terminal in my own app?Usable today and proven inside the Ghostty GUI, but the API signatures are still in flux and no version has been tagged yet; Doxygen documents the C API for now.
Does it run on Windows, or just Mac and Linux?Mac and Linux for now: the README describes the macOS app and the GTK Linux app in detail but never mentions a Windows build.
If Ghostty crashes, does anything get reported without my consent?No — reports are generated locally (by default under ~/.local/state/ghostty/crash) and sent nowhere unless you upload them yourself; they hold full thread stack memory, so treat them as sensitive.
Is it really GPU-accelerated under the hood?Yes — rendering is GPU-backed via Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux, with a multi-threaded core: dedicated read, write, and render threads per terminal and a SIMD-optimized parser.
How fast is it, really?The README places it in the top performance category: benchmarks usually put Ghostty and Alacritty within a few percentage points of each other, and both around 100x faster than Terminal.app and iTerm.
Does it have tabs and splits?Yes — the Mac and Linux apps support multi-window, tabbing, and splits, plus extras like tab renaming and coloring for organizing sessions.
What does native mean in practice on each OS?On macOS it is a true SwiftUI app with real windowing, menu bars, a settings GUI, AppleScript and Shortcuts support; on Linux it is a GTK app that integrates deeply with systemd for things like single-instance windows and cgroup isolation.
Beyond classic emulation, what modern terminal features does it support?Per the README it supports more modern sequences than almost any other terminal: Kitty graphics and image protocols, clipboard sequences, synchronized rendering, light/dark mode notifications, and more.
What are similar projects?kitty, alacritty, rio, wezterm, ggml, native, bgfx, CalcKernel
Which topics is it in?gtk, systemd, zig, simd, terminal-emulators, linux-app, opengl, metal, swiftui, native, gpu-acceleration, macos-app
Creator
ghostty-org
Size
89.3 MB
Stars
62.3K
Updated
CommitOct 16
Age
4y
Commits · 90 Days