libghostty: Why Agent Tools Build on Ghostty (and I Build a Terminal)
What libghostty is, who really uses it (and who doesn't), and a working terminal window on libghostty-vt in about 180 lines of C.
Prerequisites: a little C; to build along: Zig 0.17, SDL2 and SDL2_ttf
Not covered: GPU rendering, font fallback, the key encoder, the full libghostty that cmux embeds
Source: https://github.com/webmatze/libghostty-terminal
The terminal from this episode (one C file, Ghostty pinned to c27ef4c): https://github.com/webmatze/libghostty-terminal
Ghostling, the official minimal libghostty terminal: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling
Sources, as of 2026-10-28:
- Libghostty Is Coming (Mitchell Hashimoto, 2025-09-22): https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
- Ghostty README on libghostty: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty#cross-platform-libghostty-for-embeddable-terminals
- JetBrains: The Terminal in JetBrains IDEs Now Runs on libghostty: https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2026/10/jetbrains-terminal-now-uses-ghostty/
- Mitchell on Hacker News (memory, 10,000 terminals, Neovim, 1.0): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50262760
- Neovim PR #39773: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/39773
- cmux: https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux
- Supacode: https://github.com/supabitapp/supacode
- Calyx: https://github.com/yuuichieguchi/Calyx
- awesome-libghostty: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty
- OpenCode (ghostty-web in the app, libghostty-vt in the process daemon): https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode