Ghostty

Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, cross-platform terminal emulator written in the Zig programming language by Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder and former CTO of HashiCorp. The terminal uses platform-native UI frameworks on each operating system, rendering with the native GPU-accelerated graphics APIs rather than cross-platform abstraction layers, resulting in a terminal that feels indistinguishable from first-party applications on macOS and Linux. On macOS, Ghostty uses the native SwiftUI tab system, window restoration, and menu bar integration, while on Linux it supports GTK-based window decorations. The terminal implements the full VT terminal specification including Kitty keyboard protocol, synchronized output, styled and colored underlines, sustained text positioning, and the iTerm2 image protocol for inline image display. Ghostty ships with hundreds of built-in color themes accessible through configuration, supports separate themes for light and dark mode with automatic switching, and allows flexible custom keybindings through the keybind configuration option with trigger sequences and conditional bindings. The zero-configuration philosophy means Ghostty works perfectly out of the box with sensible defaults for fonts, colors, scrollback, and keybindings, while hundreds of configuration options are available for fine-grained customization through a simple text file. The project maintains a public API reference for terminal developers implementing the same extensions, and supports TrueColor with 24-bit color depth, programmable fonts with ligatures, and Unicode 15. Ghostty is open source under the MIT license with active development on GitHub and a Discord community.