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Welcome to Ghostty

Ghostty is a terminal emulator that differentiates itself by being fast, feature-rich, and native. While there are many excellent terminal emulators available, they all force you to choose between speed, features, or native UIs. Ghostty provides all three.
Ghostty is competitive in all three categories and doesn’t make you choose between them. It aims to be one of the best fully standards-compliant terminal emulators while remaining compatible with all existing shells and software.

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Why Ghostty?

Ghostty was built to push the boundaries of what is possible with a terminal emulator by exposing modern, opt-in features that enable CLI tool developers to build more feature-rich, interactive applications.

Lightning Fast

GPU-accelerated rendering with Metal on macOS and OpenGL on Linux. Maintains 60fps under heavy load with dedicated IO threading.

Standards Compliant

One of the most compliant terminal emulators available, implementing comprehensive xterm behavior and supporting all latest terminal innovations.

Native Experience

True SwiftUI app on macOS with Metal renderer and CoreText. GTK-based on Linux. No least-common-denominator compromises.

Feature Rich

Multi-window support, tabbing, splits, shell integration, custom themes, and extensive customization options.

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Key Features

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Performance That Scales

  • Metal on macOS: Direct Metal rendering with full ligature support (the only terminal besides iTerm with Metal)
  • OpenGL on Linux: Hardware-accelerated rendering with minimal overhead
  • Dedicated IO Thread: Very little jitter under heavy IO load
  • Optimized Text Rendering: 4x faster than iTerm and Kitty, 2x faster than Terminal.app for plain text

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Cross-Platform Native

Ghostty is truly cross-platform but doesn’t compromise on native experiences:
  • macOS: SwiftUI-based application with native menu bars, settings GUI, and Metal renderer
  • Linux: GTK-based application with native windowing
  • Shared Core: Large shared codebase written in Zig for consistency
The macOS app is a native Swift application that uses libghostty through its C API. This architecture enables embedding Ghostty in any third-party project.

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Richer Windowing

  • Multi-window support
  • Native tabbing interface
  • Window splits for side-by-side terminals
  • Cross-platform consistency

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Modern Terminal Standards

Ghostty implements:
  • ECMA-48 standard compliance
  • Comprehensive xterm compatibility
  • Support for popular terminal innovations
  • Drop-in replacement for existing terminal emulators

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Get Started

Quick Start

Get up and running with Ghostty in under 5 minutes

Installation

Install Ghostty on macOS or Linux

Configuration

Customize fonts, colors, keybindings, and more

Building from Source

Build Ghostty yourself from the source code

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Community and Development

Ghostty is open source and actively developed. The project welcomes contributions through:
  • Bug reports and feature requests
  • Pull requests for improvements
  • Documentation contributions
  • Translation and localization
For more details on contributing, see the Contributing Guide.
Ghostty is under active development. While it’s production-ready and used daily by thousands of users, some features are still being refined.

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Next Steps

1

Install Ghostty

Follow the installation guide to get Ghostty running on your system
2

Complete the Quickstart

Run through the quickstart guide to learn the basics
3

Customize Your Setup

Explore the configuration options to make Ghostty your own
4

Learn Advanced Features

Discover shell integration, themes, and performance tuning