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https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

👻 Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.
https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

Last synced: 26 days ago
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👻 Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

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README 

          






  Logo

  
Ghostty



  


    Fast, native, feature-rich terminal emulator pushing modern features.

    


    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.



In all categories, I am not trying to claim that Ghostty is the

best (i.e. the fastest, most feature-rich, or most native). But

Ghostty is competitive in all three categories and Ghostty

doesn't make you choose between them.



Ghostty also intends 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.



While aiming for this ambitious goal, our first step is to make Ghostty

one of the best fully standards compliant terminal emulator, remaining

compatible with all existing shells and software while supporting all of

the latest terminal innovations in the ecosystem. You can use Ghostty

as a drop-in replacement for your existing terminal emulator.



For more details, see [About Ghostty](https://ghostty.org/docs/about).



## Download



See the [download page](https://ghostty.org/download) on the Ghostty website.



## Documentation



See the [documentation](https://ghostty.org/docs) 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"](CONTRIBUTING.md) document. Those who would like

to get involved with Ghostty's development as well should also read the

["Developing Ghostty"](HACKING.md) document for more technical details.



## Roadmap and Status



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



|  #  | Step                                                      | Status |

| :-: | --------------------------------------------------------- | :----: |

|  1  | Standards-compliant terminal emulation                    |   ✅   |

|  2  | Competitive performance                                   |   ✅   |

|  3  | Basic customizability -- fonts, bg colors, etc.           |   ✅   |

|  4  | Richer windowing features -- multi-window, tabbing, panes |   ✅   |

|  5  | Native Platform Experiences (i.e. Mac Preference Panel)   |   ⚠️   |

|  6  | Cross-platform `libghostty` for Embeddable Terminals      |   ⚠️   |

|  7  | Windows Terminals (including PowerShell, Cmd, WSL)        |   ❌   |

|  N  | Fancy features (to be expanded upon later)                |   ❌   |



Additional details for each step in the big roadmap below:



#### Standards-Compliant Terminal Emulation



Ghostty implements enough control sequences to be used by hundreds of

testers daily for over the past year. Further, we've done a

[comprehensive xterm audit](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/632)

comparing Ghostty's behavior to xterm and building a set of conformance

test cases.



We believe Ghostty is one of the most compliant terminal emulators available.



Terminal behavior is partially a de jure standard

(i.e. [ECMA-48](https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/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



We need better benchmarks to continuously verify this, but Ghostty is

generally in the same performance category as the other highest performing

terminal emulators.



For rendering, we have a multi-renderer architecture that uses OpenGL on

Linux and Metal on macOS. As far as I'm aware, we're the only terminal

emulator other than iTerm that uses Metal directly. And we're the only

terminal emulator that has a Metal renderer that supports ligatures (iTerm

uses a CPU renderer if ligatures are enabled). We can maintain around 60fps

under heavy load and much more generally -- though the terminal is

usually rendering much lower due to little screen changes.



For IO, we have a dedicated IO thread that maintains very little jitter

under heavy IO load (i.e. `cat .txt`). On benchmarks for IO,

we're usually within a small margin of other fast terminal emulators.

For example, reading a dump of plain text is 4x faster compared to iTerm and

Kitty, and 2x faster than Terminal.app. Alacritty is very fast but we're still

around the same speed (give or take) and our app experience is much more

feature rich.



> [!NOTE]

> Despite being _very fast_, there is a lot of room for improvement here.



#### Richer Windowing Features



The Mac and Linux (build with GTK) apps support multi-window, tabbing, and

splits.



#### 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.

- The Linux app is built with GTK.



There are more improvements to be made. The macOS settings window is still

a work-in-progress. Similar improvements will follow with Linux.



#### 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`.



This goal is not hypothetical! The macOS app is a `libghostty` consumer.

The macOS app is a native Swift app developed in Xcode and `main()` is

within Swift. The Swift app links to `libghostty` and uses the C API to

render terminals.



This step encompasses expanding `libghostty` support to more platforms

and more use cases. At the time of writing this, `libghostty` is very

Mac-centric -- particularly around rendering -- and we have work to do to

expand this to other platforms.



## 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](https://develop.sentry.dev/sdk/envelopes/). 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](https://docs.sentry.io/cli/installation/):



```shell-session

SENTRY_DSN=https://e914ee84fd895c4fe324afa3e53dac76@o4507352570920960.ingest.us.sentry.io/4507850923638784 sentry-cli send-envelope --raw 

```



> [!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 when the crash occurred.