- Category
- Developer Tools
- Rank
- No. 1409Tools index
- Pricing
- Open Source
- Type
- TOOL
- Interfaces
- CLI
- Builder
- ghostty-org
- GitHub
- 1.1k stars
- Date
About
Minimum viable terminal emulator built on libghostty's C API — reference implementation for the Ghostty engine.
What it does
Ghostling opens the user’s shell inside a graphical window, passes terminal output through Ghostty’s parsing and state engine, and draws the result with Raylib. It handles resizing, scrollback, colors, text styles, Unicode graphemes, keyboard input, mouse reporting, focus events, and Kitty protocols.
Why it's ranked here
This is a strong teaching artifact for developers embedding terminal behavior. Its small C application exposes the practical boundary between terminal state, operating-system process handling, input translation, and rendering. The candid warnings matter: this is demonstration code, not a carefully audited terminal for routine use.
What's good
The project keeps the surrounding application understandable while inheriting substantial terminal behavior from the library. It demonstrates text reflow, rich color, styles, scrollback, several mouse modes, Unicode graphemes, and graphics support. The renderer remains replaceable because the terminal engine manages render state without owning windowing or drawing.
Tradeoffs
The application is single-threaded and uses a basic 2D renderer rather than direct GPU rendering. Raylib cannot provide sufficiently rich input events for every Kitty keyboard case. There is no clipboard integration, text shaping, tabs, splits, multiple windows, session management, configuration interface, or search interface. Windows operation remains untested or unimplemented here.
How to use it well
Use Ghostling when learning the C embedding surface, prototyping a custom terminal interface, or studying how shell processes, terminal state, input, and rendering connect. Build an optimized configuration before measuring performance. Choose a full terminal application when you need workspace management, configuration, search, clipboard support, or daily-use assurance.
Technical notes+
main.c is a C11 application that starts the user’s shell through forkpty(), makes the PTY master nonblocking, feeds output into ghostty_terminal_vt_write(), translates Raylib keyboard and mouse events, and embeds JetBrains Mono in the binary. CMakeLists.txt fetches Raylib 5.5 when unavailable locally, fetches a pinned Ghostty revision, links ghostty-vt, and invokes bin2header.cmake to generate the font header. flake.nix supplies Zig, CMake, Ninja, and platform libraries. .github/workflows/test.yml performs Nix-based builds on Linux and macOS.
Observed
- License
- MIT License; bundled JetBrains Mono font uses SIL Open Font License 1.1
- Primary language
- C11
- Interface
- Graphical terminal executable backed by libghostty-vt’s C API
- Build surface
- Source build with CMake 3.19+, Ninja, a C compiler, and Zig 0.16.x
- Platform support
- Linux and macOS have CI build jobs; Windows support is untested or not implemented in Ghostling
- Project structure
- The terminal application is implemented in one C source file
- Rendering
- Raylib provides windowing and 2D rendering; libghostty-vt provides terminal and render state
Read from README.md, main.c, .envrc, LICENSE, AGENTS.md, flake.nix, flake.lock, CMakeLists.txt, bin2header.cmake, fonts/OFL.txt, .github/pinact.yml, .github/workflows/test.yml.
What it can do
Execute terminal commands
Command line instructions → Command execution results and output text
Display terminal sessions
Terminal process data → Rendered terminal interface with text and formatting
Process keyboard input
Keyboard keystrokes and key combinations → Terminal commands and text input
Handle text rendering
Terminal text data with escape sequences → Formatted text display with colors and styling
Manage terminal processes
Process spawn requests → Running terminal process instances
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Tech Stack
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