[opensourcedex]

Ghostty is a free, open source terminals project written in Zig and released under MIT. It has 61,231 GitHub stars, 3,461 forks and 251 open issues, and was last pushed 3 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #3 of 8 tracked projects in Terminals, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 227 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

What is Ghostty?

Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration, written in Zig under the MIT licence and aimed at developers who want speed, features, and a native app experience in one terminal instead of choosing between them.

What it is

Ghostty is a terminal emulator and, through libghostty, an embeddable terminal library. The project is written in Zig and released under the MIT licence. Its ecosystem is the terminal emulator space — the crowded field that includes Alacritty, iTerm, Terminal.app, and xterm — and it is built around a stated priority order for behaviour: standards such as ECMA-48 first, xterm second where a feature exists there, and other popular terminals third. That ordering is the project's definition of "standard," and it is backed by a comprehensive xterm audit logged as issue 632, which compares Ghostty's behaviour against xterm and builds a set of conformance test cases.

The concrete problem Ghostty solves is the trade-off the README calls out directly: existing terminal emulators "all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs." Traditional or "slow" terminals such as Terminal.app and iTerm offer features and native feel but are roughly 100x slower on benchmarks, while the well-known fast terminals are leaner in features and less native in presentation. Ghostty's claim is that it provides all three at once. It also replaces the work of writing terminal emulation from scratch: libghostty is a cross-platform, zero-dependency C and Zig library that lets anyone build a terminal emulator or embed terminal functionality, such as style parsing, into their own applications.

Key capabilities

  • Standards-compliant emulation that implements all regularly used control sequences and runs every mainstream terminal program, verified against the xterm audit in issue 632 and a set of conformance test cases.
  • Modern control sequences beyond typical legacy support, including the Kitty graphics protocol, Kitty image protocol, clipboard sequences, synchronized rendering, and light/dark mode notifications.
  • GPU acceleration paired with platform-native UI, rather than a single cross-platform toolkit drawn everywhere.
  • Window management features: multi-window, tabbing, and panes, all marked complete on the project roadmap.
  • libghostty, a cross-platform, zero-dependency C and Zig library for building terminal emulators or embedding terminal functionality into other applications.
  • Worked embedding examples: the Ghostling project as a minimal complete example, plus smaller C and Zig samples in the examples directory.
  • Performance in the same category as the fastest terminals — usually within a few percentage points of Alacritty on benchmarks — while remaining more feature-rich and more native in app experience.

Who uses it and how

  • Daily driver use at scale: the README states Ghostty is stable and in use by millions of people and machines daily.
  • Application developers embedding terminal functionality through libghostty, using Ghostling or the examples directory as the starting point for C and Zig integrations.
  • Contributors and maintainers working from CONTRIBUTING.md for pull request and issue process, and HACKING.md for the more technical development details.
  • Terminal-centric workflows that lean on multi-window, tabbing, and panes rather than a single-window session.
  • Cross-platform users who want the same terminal behaviour on each platform with a native-feeling interface on each.

Getting started

The README does not carry install commands; it points to the download page at https://ghostty.org/download, with documentation at https://ghostty.org/docs. Developers building on the library should start from Ghostling or the examples directory and read CONTRIBUTING.md and HACKING.md.

How it compares

Against Alacritty, the facts put both in the same performance category and usually within a few percentage points of each other on benchmarks, with Ghostty described as much more feature-rich and offering a much more native app experience. Against Terminal.app and iTerm, Ghostty is described as something like 100x faster while still providing native UI, which is the combination the README argues those terminals do not offer. xterm appears in a different role: not a competitor to beat on speed, but the behavioural reference that Ghostty audits itself against and falls back to when no formal standard covers a feature.

When to use it — and when not to

The README is short and delegates heavily to the website: download, documentation, and the about page all live at ghostty.org, and no package name, Docker image, or compose file appears in the repository README, so anyone wanting a single documented command from the repo itself will not find one. The roadmap still lists Ghostty-only terminal control sequences as not done, so users depending on emulator-specific sequences beyond the standards, xterm, and common-terminal set should check current status first, and the project carries 251 open issues. It is a reasonable choice for people who want a native, GPU-accelerated terminal with broad protocol support and who are comfortable installing from the project's own download page rather than a repository-documented package route.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Logo
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:

  • The macOS app is a true SwiftUI-based application with all the things you would expect such as real windowing, menu bars, a settings GUI, etc.
  • macOS uses a true Metal renderer with CoreText for font discovery.
  • macOS supports AppleScript, Apple Shortcuts (AppIntents), etc.
  • The Linux app is built with GTK.
  • The Linux app integrates deeply with systemd if available for things like always-on, new windows in a single instance, cgroup isolation, etc.

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 Ghostt

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is Ghostty free to use?

Ghostty is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Ghostty do?

Fast GPU-accelerated terminal with native UI design

What is Ghostty written in?

Ghostty is primarily written in Zig. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty, and it has 61,231 GitHub stars.