Personal fork of Ghostty with a sidebar tab system for macOS. Not affiliated with the upstream project. For the official Ghostty terminal, visit ghostty.org.

🧪 Experimental
Please note that this is experimental and I built it for my own use. It works fine for me, but feel free and try to break it.

🐛 Known bugs
- Unread indicator does not clear correctly, and might re-appear when switching tabs

Replaces the native tab bar with a left sidebar showing rich tab cards:

• Title, directory, git branch — git branch detected automatically, no setup needed
• Custom status entries — show ports, environments, or any metadata via CLI
• Attention indicators — orange dot on tabs with notifications or bell
• Drag-and-drop — reorder tabs by dragging
• Theme-aware — colors derived from your terminal theme

# Choose which fields to show (default: all) sidebar-fields = title,directory,git-branch,status 

Install: symlink cli/ghosttyctl to somewhere on your PATH (e.g. ~/.local/bin/ghosttyctl).

ghosttyctl rename "My Tab" # rename tab ghosttyctl notify --title "Done" --body "Build finished" # send notification ghosttyctl set-status server "localhost:3000" --icon network # add status entry ghosttyctl clear-status server # remove it ghosttyctl list # list all tabs ghosttyctl current # current tab info

Add to your ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md so Claude Code can name its tabs and set status:

- Rename the workspace using: `ghosttyctl rename "Claude: <name>"`. Name it after the work being done. - Set sidebar status entries using `ghosttyctl set-status <key> <value> [--icon <sf-symbol>]` and clear with `ghosttyctl clear-status <key>`.

Fast, native, feature-rich terminal emulator pushing modern features.
About · Download · Documentation · Contributing · Developing

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.

In all categories, I am not trying to claim that Ghostty is the best (i.e. the fastest, most feature-rich, or most native). But Ghostty is competitive in all three categories and Ghostty doesn't make you choose between them.

Ghostty also intends 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.

While aiming for this ambitious goal, our first step is to make Ghostty one of the best fully standards compliant terminal emulator, remaining compatible with all existing shells and software while supporting all of the latest terminal innovations in the ecosystem. You can use Ghostty as a drop-in replacement for your existing terminal emulator.

For more details, see About Ghostty.

See the download page on the Ghostty website.

See the documentation on the Ghostty website.

If you have any ideas, issues, etc. regarding Ghostty, or would like to contribute to Ghostty through pull requests, please check out our "Contributing to Ghostty" document. Those who would like to get involved with Ghostty's development as well should also read the "Developing Ghostty" document for more technical details.

The high-level ambitious plan for the project, in order:

Additional details for each step in the big roadmap below:

Ghostty implements enough control sequences to be used by hundreds of testers daily for over the past year. Further, we've done a comprehensive xterm audit comparing Ghostty's behavior to xterm and building a set of conformance test cases.

We believe Ghostty is one of the most compliant terminal emulators available.

Terminal behavior is partially a de jure standard (i.e. ECMA-48) but mostly a de facto standard as defined by popular terminal emulators worldwide. Ghostty takes the approach that our behavior is defined by (1) standards, if available, (2) xterm, if the feature exists, (3) other popular terminals, in that order. This defines what the Ghostty project views as a "standard."

We need better benchmarks to continuously verify this, but Ghostty is generally in the same performance category as the other highest performing terminal emulators.

For rendering, we have a multi-renderer architecture that uses OpenGL on Linux and Metal on macOS. As far as I'm aware, we're the only terminal emulator other than iTerm that uses Metal directly. And we're the only terminal emulator that has a Metal renderer that supports ligatures (iTerm uses a CPU renderer if ligatures are enabled). We can maintain around 60fps under heavy load and much more generally -- though the terminal is usually rendering much lower due to little screen changes.

For IO, we have a dedicated IO thread that maintains very little jitter under heavy IO load (i.e. cat <big file>.txt). On benchmarks for IO, we're usually within a small margin of other fast terminal emulators. For example, reading a dump of plain text is 4x faster compared to iTerm and Kitty, and 2x faster than Terminal.app. Alacritty is very fast but we're still around the same speed (give or take) and our app experience is much more feature rich.

The Mac and Linux (build with GTK) apps support multi-window, tabbing, and splits.

Ghostty is a cross-platform terminal emulator but we don't aim for a least-common-denominator experience. There is a large, shared core written in Zig but we do a lot of platform-native things:

• The macOS app is a true SwiftUI-based application with all the things you would expect such as real windowing, menu bars, a settings GUI, etc.
• macOS uses a true Metal renderer with CoreText for font discovery.
• The Linux app is built with GTK.

There are more improvements to be made. The macOS settings window is still a work-in-progress. Similar improvements will follow with Linux.

In addition to being a standalone terminal emulator, Ghostty is a C-compatible library for embedding a fast, feature-rich terminal emulator in any 3rd party project. This library is called libghostty.

Due to the scope of this project, we're breaking libghostty down into separate actually libraries, starting with libghostty-vt. The goal of this project is to focus on parsing terminal sequences and maintaining terminal state. This is covered in more detail in this blog post.

libghostty-vt is already available and usable today for Zig and C and is compatible for macOS, Linux, Windows, and WebAssembly. At the time of writing this, the API isn't stable yet and we haven't tagged an official release, but the core logic is well proven (since Ghostty uses it) and we're working hard on it now.

The ultimate goal is not hypothetical! The macOS app is a libghostty consumer. The macOS app is a native Swift app developed in Xcode and main() is within Swift. The Swift app links to libghostty and uses the C API to render terminals.

Ghostty has a built-in crash reporter that will generate and save crash reports to disk. The crash reports are saved to the $XDG_STATE_HOME/ghostty/crash directory. If $XDG_STATE_HOME is not set, the default is ~/.local/state. Crash reports are not automatically sent anywhere off your machine.

Crash reports are only generated the next time Ghostty is started after a crash. If Ghostty crashes and you want to generate a crash report, you must restart Ghostty at least once. You should see a message in the log that a crash report was generated.

Crash reports end in the .ghosttycrash extension. The crash reports are in Sentry envelope format. You can upload these to your own Sentry account to view their contents, but the format is also publicly documented so any other available tools can also be used. The ghostty +crash-report CLI command can be used to list any crash reports. A future version of Ghostty will show you the contents of the crash report directly in the terminal.

To send the crash report to the Ghostty project, you can use the following CLI command using the Sentry CLI:

SENTRY_DSN=https://e914ee84fd895c4fe324afa3e53dac76@o4507352570920960.ingest.us.sentry.io/4507850923638784 sentry-cli send-envelope --raw <path to ghostty crash>