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Comment by mitchellh

16 hours ago

These are Ghostty GUI release notes, but I want to take a moment to highlight the libghostty progress we've made since Ghostty 1.3.

As a reminder, libghostty is the highly portable, embeddable library that provides core terminal emulation, render state, and more. I always felt that a free, high qualty, lightweight, reusable terminal emulation core would benefit the developer world more than any single GUI application. And that is playing out!

It is and always was my true purpose with the Ghostty project (I said this in my first ever talk about Ghostty!). I've jokingly said many times that Ghostty GUI is just a glorified tech demo for libghostty. That's not fair though, because GUI is great and there are really talented people working on it.

Since I started the project, Ghostty has always gotten people saying "I don't understand why you'd start a terminal emulator today." Well, the answer is libghostty. It's truly unique and its enabling something special (imo!).

Highlights of libghostty since 6 months ago (none of the below was true 6 months ago):

- Libghostty has nearly 100% coverage of all of Ghostty's core (and you can compile with flags to remove any of these features for size/safety): https://libghostty.tip.ghostty.org/

- Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: Apple (macOS, iOS, visionOS), Windows (MSVC and GNU), Linux, FreeBSD, Android, WebAssembly, and freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).

- Libghostty has bindings in pretty much every popular programming language: C, Zig, Go, Swift, Python, Rust, .NET, etc.

- Libghostty's memory requirements have dramatically shrunk to enable the portability above. There's still work to do but a single empty terminal now takes 90% less memory. And at scale I've proven 10,000 active (input/output happening) terminals on a Linux server with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM.

- Libghostty powers all JetBrains IDE terminals, over 12.5 million active users. https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2026/10/jetbrains-termin...

- Libghostty is the most popular core behind the wave of venture-backed "agentic" terminals and editors, such as Herdr, cmux, and many others.

- Libghostty is being discussed and has been verbally accepted to replace the terminal core in Neovim: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/39773 (work still to be done)

- Libghostty powers a really popular and powerful terminal emulator for emacs (Ghostel): https://github.com/dakra/ghostel

- Libghostty's speed is used by Antithesis to fuzz popular terminal programs and has directly led to hundreds of bug fixes sent upstream to programs such as tmux, btop, shells, and other terminal emulators. :)

- And so much more: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty

Libghostty is really successfully turning into the tide that raises all boats. As it becomes more popular, Ghostty itself gets more performant and stable, and so does everyone else. It is also a vehicle for delivering modern terminal emulation to the widest source possible.

I plan on tagging libghostty 1.0 in the next few months and declaring ABI stability at that point!

82 comments

mitchellh

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why-el  15 hours ago

Because of your multiple "I am tired of saying this, but this text was written by me and not an LLM" in your blog posts, I want to tell you that I read it word for word. :D I know this comment adds not much but I felt it needed to be said.

  • NorthSouthNorth  14 hours ago

    One almost forgets how easy it is to read a wall of text when it was written by a human. This was nice to read (also because you can feel it's got care behind it).

    • vhiremath4  8 hours ago

      I have been reading through pharma textbooks written before AI and realized it's so relieving to follow language that has been crafted over multiple editions by humans. When I started to realize how much easier it was for me to read textbooks than the average AI-assisted text, that's when I realized we are truly cooked (at least for this chapter of AI + writing).

      1 reply →

    • elxr  1 hour ago

      Amen. I'll never, ever stop writing my own articles by hand.

      I don't mind if my English isn't entirely idiomatic and all my sentence constuctions aren't "by the book" correct. I want to write, and I want anyone reading my writing to know that it's the product of thinking and editing that's unique to me.

    • lukan  5 hours ago

      "One almost forgets how easy it is to read a wall of text when it was written by a human. "

      Erm, this really depends on the human I think.

    • _matthew_  10 hours ago

      Lowkey so true. I was wondering why I was able to read to the end without getting lost or distracted lol

  • tigerlily  10 hours ago

    When I am tired, it's when I know I am alive.

    • jan_m_savage  8 hours ago

      what a great quote.

      here's another:

      "when i am sad, i have to remind myself that sadness i feel so as to qualify me to enjoy and feel joy."

      this is not mine, it's a paraphrase of a poem verse from Mawlawi (aka Rumi in the West).

      1 reply →

sho_hn  15 hours ago

I'm from the KDE project, and have been working on a new frontend built on libghostty-vt to hopefully one day ease our maintenance burden.

It's been a quite smooth experience, and I remain very excited about the lib. I believe you are successfully setting the standard. Big congrats for your 1.4.0!

  • c-hendricks  13 hours ago

    Ooooo, will this end up in Konsole / konsolepart? Or will it be a new app?

    • sho_hn  12 hours ago

      It'll be a new app, but it does provide a drop-in replacement for konsolepart (along with also having a QML module API for embeds into Qt Quick-based app, closing a gap Konsole currently leaves open). I'm sure it'll be some time before it would be ready to replace Konsole as default, also because conversations like that take some time and are a community process.

      2 replies →

ashkankiani  13 hours ago

Thank you for your work on this. When I was working on neovim core and started dealing more and more with the edge cases of libvterm and terminal emulation in general, I had the same thought "we should just have a gold standard library for this." But that was 6/7 years ago (2019) and a lot of stuff happened in that interim unrelated to engineering that demotivated me from pursuing it.

Periodically, I would run into TUI issues and think "I should just finally do it," especially around wanting to replace tmux in general. But I knew from experience the long tail of annoying issues for terminals that it's more time consuming than it appears, and so I again never bothered.

Thanks for the good work to raise all boats :)

I tend to move away from terminal emulation towards GUI when I can (and using custom remote protocols somewhat inspired by arcan), but TUI is still useful for a while. I actually had a need for a good terminal emulation library for the fallback TUI/pty attachment for non-gui programs for my supervisor, so I'll try out libghostty.

_emacsomancer_  6 hours ago

libghostty is brilliant and I'm very glad it exists. ghostel in Emacs is completely brilliant and so fast compared to anything else, a wonderful project fascinated by libghostty. another i might mention is zmx [ https://zmx.sh/ ] - process persister (detach, attach) with panes, tabs, hijacking the terminal. i always end up using tmux just for persistence and then am frustrated I can't remember how to copy etc. zmx has more features than some things of a similar nature and my understanding is that it's able to be taking advantage of libghostty things.

(a couple of us working on packaging libghostty and ghostty proper to for Guix at the moment )

febed  15 hours ago

As a fairly recent ghostty user I was surprised with how quickly it became my default terminal. Very smooth experience so far.

yjftsjthsd-h  16 hours ago

> Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: [...] freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).

That's really cool, but I'm drawing a blank; what's it used for? Embedded terminal something?

  • mitchellh  16 hours ago

    Yep, fun little demo: https://x.com/UzaAft/status/2093774764598817022

    • yjftsjthsd-h  15 hours ago

      Okay, that's fun:) ...so if I use this on an ESP* with a physical display and keyboard attached, at what point does it stop counting as a terminal emulator again?:)

    • Imustaskforhelp  15 hours ago

      > Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: [...] freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS).

      I am really impressed. When I had read your original comment, I literally shouted oye! (meaning woah) because of how interesting it felt. Glad that I can see the demo as well.

      But aside from the fun little demo, what are the real use cases that we can think of as well.

      here are some that I have thought of

      1. SSH'ing into a terminal (VPS) or being able to view what the AI agents are doing on that VPS and controlling them very thinly in your pocket.

      2. I have a slight dream that I'd like to chip in but I always wanted to create something like monkeytype but on embedded-hardware. Something which can just plug to TV's and people can connect a keyboard and start to type.

      3. Or another idea but being a book reader and having it connect to some library resource

      (2) & (3) for the underdeveloped regions.

      Maybe (1) can be good as well and could very well be a small computer terminal which can teach/help the underdeveloped regions.

      I live in India and I see it first hand how genuinely just want to create some extremely minimalist software on extremely cheap hardware to make funding of them easier and more scalable.

      This also makes the constraints work good as one of the govt's basically spent a lot of money providing mid/high end tablets to every children and it turned out to be quite catastrophic because although it was kiosked because it was just intended to watch videos or read resources.

      Children paid people to crack it and then started using instagram on it. My mother is a govt. teacher and she strongly thinks that it was a waste of resources and even the parents of the children and local village meeting committees think so as well. I remember reading some local news articles about villages conducting meetings on how to prevent their children from such instagram addiction so quickly after the tabs were given.

      I would like to hope that maybe someday someone creates the more optimal solution to the problems that I discussed and libghostty comes handy to the situation. Thanks for making it and have a nice day :-D

riskassessment  15 hours ago

Agreed on the value of libghostty. I switched from vterm to ghostel recently and it's solved some refresh issues I previously had with vterm when using CLI coding agents in emacs.

Atreiden  12 hours ago

Just wanted to say thank you for all your contributions to our industry, Mitchell. I love Ghostty and your vision here, and evangelize it whenever I can.

It's a pleasure reading your posts.

trollbridge  14 hours ago

Maybe I’m just dreaming here but how far off is libghostty for Linux consoles?

  • kritr  9 hours ago

    I prototyped this last week. Unfortunately the apprt abstraction I used isn’t something ghostty will externally support. So a proper console port needs to be rebuilt on libghostty.

    But if you run nix you could give it a whirl: https://github.com/KritR/ghostty-kms

    • gen2brain  1 hour ago

      I tried to use kmscon before, and it does work nice and is much faster. But, I can only have one app that is using DRM, i.e., I cannot start console/DRM image viewer from such terminal, or mpv, etc. That is a deal breaker and issue for me.

mappu  2 hours ago

Is it feasible to implement the libvte surface on top of libghostty? Might be interesting as a drop-in replacement.

kinleyd  5 hours ago

Awesome, great going Mitchell! And Ghostel, which I'm hearing of for the first time, sounds very exciting.

solyin  10 hours ago

Thank you for Ghostty! I've got an insane fork (AI generated) that uses variable width fonts and then does math so columns (like in top) still line up!

Any interest in moving console typography past the 80's, since computers are fast now?

olwmc  12 hours ago

Absolutely incredible. You've convinced our team to start getting to work in Zig and we're loving it!! Thanks for all you do

derwiki  11 hours ago

I know it’s been said elsewhere ITT, but thank you for making and supporting Ghostty!

ExoticPearTree  12 hours ago

Any plans for Ghostty to have the history of the terminal window reloaded on restart? Like the Mac native terminal app does? I am a heavy terminal user with a lot of tabs open, and after I restart the computer for whatever reason, I would like to have my terminal(s) as I left them.

jen20  14 hours ago

Aha, I wondered why the JetBrains terminals had become so much better recently. Didn't realize they'd made the switch.

8n4vidtmkvmk  9 hours ago

Thank you for libghostty! I'm using it for my own terminal on Windows. I'm quite pleased with it

  • febed  4 hours ago

    Curious which terminal is this? I've been looking for a Windows terminal app which uses Ghostty.

nico  14 hours ago

Thank you for making Ghostty, it’s a pleasure to use it everyday for work :)

bmitc  11 hours ago

What are use cases of libghostty? Is it for building things like the terminal inside VS Code or any other such GUI application?

Onavo  14 hours ago

If I don't want to use the wave of "venture backed ghostty wrappers" for remote mobile coding similar to Claude Code remote, what options do I have? Any plans for a first party remote solution that's not SSH?

ChickeNES  12 hours ago

Isn’t it written in Zig? Not sure how that is “highly portable” compared to C

geokon  11 hours ago

terminal emulation keeps playing a central role in "computing" not withstanding it being an ugly prehistoric crocodile. Do you ever envision creating something modern, without the warts and with a design that incorporates half a century of lessons-learned? Something that fills this need but in a more elegant package? I'm asking because you're one of the few people that seems well-positioned to make a clean-slate replacement

I personally avoid using the terminal as much as possible b/c the whole things feels very archaic/fragile/baroque - but the central idea seems great and I'd love a modern take on it

  • elcritch  7 hours ago

    Certainly parts of terminals protocols are archaic, but overall it's not nearly as fragile as you make it out to be.

    • geokon  7 hours ago

      the number of gotchas involved in bash scripting indicates to me it's very hard to make robust solutions using the terminal. Trying to understand how things like colors work in the terminal makes the whole thing look very duct-taped together

_doctor_love  10 hours ago

> And at scale I've proven 10,000 active (input/output happening) terminals on a Linux server with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM.

When you say you've proven, are you hinting at use of formal verification?

colechristensen  15 hours ago

Why is libghostty better than alacritty?

Although not necessarily advertised as such, I've been successfully using alacritty in several projects injecting terminals into things both serious and silly.

  • skhameneh  14 hours ago

    I wouldn’t say it’s better, because that’s very subjective, but it is more “feature complete”. Alacritty is very minimal and rejects community PRs for features often driven by their general ethos. libghostty supports a lot of features I don’t foresee making their way into Alacritty.

    I use Alacritty and GNOME Terminal. I don’t have a great reason for not using or trying Ghostty other than I have a minor aversion to Zig. (Again, not a great reason and arguably a not good reason)

TrueDuality  16 hours ago

I'm super excited for you and this, but this is mostly a highlight list of who is using your library. I was kind of excited to read about the actual changes to the library but I suppose I can go read the changelog on my own.