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): 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. blog.jetbrains.com
- 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: neovim#39773 (work still to be done)
- Libghostty powers a really popular and powerful terminal emulator for emacs (Ghostel): 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: 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!
Mentions
@chenhonzhou @mitchellh Just gonna chime in as 1 of the authors of Uzaaft/libghostty-rs. libghostty is already benefiting from rust without having to be written in it! I upstream UB, and safety fixes whenever I hit them in the rust bindings. Best of both worlds.
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): 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. blog.jetbrains.com - 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: neovim#39773 (work still to be done) - Libghostty powers a really popular and powerful terminal emulator for emacs (Ghostel): 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: 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!