ghostty-org/ghostty

What it is

Ghostty is a terminal emulator that aims to avoid the usual trade-off between speed, features, and a native interface. The macOS app is a SwiftUI application with a Metal renderer and CoreText font discovery; the Linux app is built with GTK and integrates with systemd when available. Both support multiple windows, tabs, and splits, including tab renaming and coloring. A shared core is written in Zig.

On the terminal side, Ghostty implements the commonly used control sequences and can run mainstream terminal programs. Beyond legacy xterm behavior it supports newer sequences such as the Kitty graphics and image protocols, clipboard sequences, synchronized rendering, and light/dark mode notifications. When behavior is ambiguous, the project defines its standard as: published standards first, then xterm, then other popular terminals. The renderer uses OpenGL on Linux and Metal on macOS, and the parser is multithreaded with SIMD optimizations.

The same codebase also produces libghostty, a zero-dependency C and Zig library for embedding a terminal or reusing terminal functionality. The first component, libghostty-vt, parses terminal sequences and maintains terminal state; it works on macOS, Linux, Windows, and WebAssembly, and its functionality is stable though its API signatures are still changing.

Getting started

The README points to the download page for installing the app; build and platform details are not reproduced there. If you want to embed a terminal, start from the provided examples: small C and Zig samples live in the examples directory, and Ghostling is a minimal complete project that uses libghostty. The C API is documented at the libghostty Doxygen site, and a community list of projects and resources lives in awesome-libghostty. There is no tagged libghostty release yet.

Constraints

• Platforms: the GUI apps are macOS (SwiftUI/Metal) and Linux (GTK). libghostty-vt also targets Windows and WebAssembly.
• Library API stability: the API signatures of libghostty are still in flux even though its functionality is considered stable; treat it as a moving target until versions are tagged.
• Crash reports: reports are written to $XDG_STATE_HOME/ghostty/crash (or ~/.local/state/ghostty/crash by default) and are never sent automatically. A report is only generated the next time Ghostty starts after a crash, and it may contain sensitive data because it includes the full stack memory of each thread at crash time. You can list reports with ghostty +crash-report; the .ghosttycrash files use the Sentry envelope format and can be uploaded to your own Sentry instance.
• License: MIT.

HotRepo's take

In the HotRepo weekly snapshot for 2026-11-01 (all languages), Ghostty sat at rank 16 with 556 stars added that week and 63,124 stars total; no daily all-language rank has been recorded for it. The HN discussions are less about terminal features than about project process: users cannot open issues directly, and AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions (773 and 729 points respectively). Those threads explain why some debugging happens in Discussions, X, and Discord before becoming an issue; one commenter reported abandoning Ghostty over a memory leak on an 8 GB machine (comment). The "no updates since March" thread was answered by the creator, who described a six-month release cycle with 1.4 delayed to October, and by commenters saying a terminal does not need frequent releases (thread, creator's reply, reply). Taken together, the station data shows a large, heavily discussed project whose release cadence and contribution rules, rather than missing core functionality, are the main source of debate.