Linux

Ghostty – feature-rich and cross-platform terminal emulator

Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

Ghostty is designed to look, feel, and behave like you expect an application to behave in your desktop environment. Ghostty differentiates itself with its architecture. The core of Ghostty is a cross-platform, C-ABI compatible library called libghostty. libghostty provides the core terminal emulation, font handling, and rendering capabilities.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

  • Aims to be fast.
  •  Feature-rich:
    • Supports the Kitty graphics protocol, light/dark mode notifications, hyperlinks, and more. This lets terminal applications like Neovim, Zellij, and others do more than they could in other terminal emulators.
    • Supports native tabs, splits, a drop-down terminal on macOS, theme switching on system dark/light mode, and more.
  • Integrates with system capabilities that are unique to the platform.
  • Shell integration – automatically inject shell integration for bash, zsh, fish, and elvish.
    • Do not confirm close for terminals where the cursor is at a prompt.
    • New terminals start in the working directory of the previously focused terminal.
    • Complex prompts resize correctly by allowing the shell to redraw — rather than reflow — the prompt line.
    • Triple-click while holding control (Linux) or command (macOS) to select the output of a command.
    • The cursor at the prompt is turned into a bar to represent more typical text editing.
    • The jump_to_prompt keybinding can be used to scroll the terminal window forward and back through prompts.
    • Alt+click (option+click on macOS) moves the cursor to the click location while at a prompt.
    • sudo can be automatically wrapped to preserve Ghostty terminfo (disabled by default).
  • Highly configurable – supports hundreds of configuration options to make it look and behave exactly how you want.
  • Supports flexible, custom keybindings through the keybind configuration option.
  • Ships with hundreds of built-in themes that can be selected with one line of configuration by using the theme configuration option.
  • Cross-platform support – runs under Linux and macOS. On Linux, the GUI is written in Zig and uses the GTK4 C API.

Website: ghostty.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Mitchell Hashimoto and contributors
License: MIT License

Ghostty in action

Ghostty is written in Zig. Learn Zig with our recommended free tutorials.

This article was contributed by a visitor who completed this form. Help the site by suggesting new open source software.


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Read our verdict in the software roundup.


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