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Update README (#11748)

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The README hasn't been updated in years basically! 

This updates the README to make libghostty a first class citizen of the
project and to update our roadmap and goals for the project to more
accurately reflect our current state and future plans.

I notably updated our roadmap to be more accurate to our state, e.g.
we're stable now. I removed Windows because it's not a short term focus
and I think libghostty is more important and enables that ecosystem a
lot more (libghostty itself being already compatible with Windows). I
also expanded on "fancy features" and clarified its to make
Ghostty-specific sequences.
This commit is contained in:
Mitchell Hashimoto
2026-03-22 07:59:36 -07:00
committed by GitHub
parent ecc55b94c8 1f2a3b8a83
commit 7d816f8e81
1 changed files with 83 additions and 60 deletions
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README.md
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@@ -7,6 +7,8 @@
<p align="center">
Fast, native, feature-rich terminal emulator pushing modern features.
<br />
A native GUI or embeddable library via <code>libghostty</code>.
<br />
<a href="#about">About</a>
·
<a href="https://ghostty.org/download">Download</a>
@@ -26,20 +28,13 @@ 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.
**`libghostty`** is a cross-platform, zero-dependency C and Zig library
for building terminal emulators or utilizing terminal functionality
(such as style parsing). Anyone can use `libghostty` to build a terminal
emulator or embed a terminal into their own applications. See
[Ghostling](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling) for a minimal complete project
example or the [`examples` directory](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/tree/main/example)
for smaller examples of using `libghostty` in C and Zig.
For more details, see [About Ghostty](https://ghostty.org/docs/about).
@@ -61,30 +56,37 @@ to get involved with Ghostty's development as well should also read the
## Roadmap and Status
Ghostty is stable and in use by millions of people and machines daily.
The high-level ambitious plan for the project, in order:
| # | Step | Status |
| :-: | --------------------------------------------------------- | :----: |
| 1 | Standards-compliant terminal emulation | ✅ |
| 2 | Competitive performance | ✅ |
| 3 | Basic customizability -- fonts, bg colors, etc. | ✅ |
| 4 | Richer windowing features -- multi-window, tabbing, panes | ✅ |
| 5 | Native Platform Experiences (i.e. Mac Preference Panel) | ⚠️ |
| 6 | Cross-platform `libghostty` for Embeddable Terminals | ⚠️ |
| 7 | Windows Terminals (including PowerShell, Cmd, WSL) | ❌ |
| N | Fancy features (to be expanded upon later) | ❌ |
| # | Step | Status |
| :-: | ------------------------------------------------------- | :----: |
| 1 | Standards-compliant terminal emulation | ✅ |
| 2 | Competitive performance | ✅ |
| 3 | Rich windowing features -- multi-window, tabbing, panes | ✅ |
| 4 | Native Platform Experiences | ✅ |
| 5 | Cross-platform `libghostty` for Embeddable Terminals | ✅ |
| 6 | Ghostty-only Terminal Control Sequences | ❌ |
Additional details for each step in the big roadmap below:
#### Standards-Compliant Terminal Emulation
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](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/632)
Ghostty implements all of the regularly used control sequences and
can run every mainstream terminal program without issue. For legacy sequences,
we've done a [comprehensive xterm audit](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/632)
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.
In addition to legacy sequences (what you'd call real "terminal" emulation),
Ghostty also supports more modern sequences than almost any other terminal
emulator. These features include things like the Kitty graphics protocol,
Kitty image protocol, clipboard sequences, synchronized rendering,
light/dark mode notifications, and many, many more.
We believe Ghostty is one of the most compliant and feature-rich terminal
emulators available.
Terminal behavior is partially a de jure standard
(i.e. [ECMA-48](https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-48/))
@@ -96,33 +98,30 @@ views as a "standard."
#### Competitive Performance
We need better benchmarks to continuously verify this, but Ghostty is
generally in the same performance category as the other highest performing
terminal emulators.
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.
"The same performance category" means that Ghostty is much faster than
traditional or "slow" terminals and is within an unnoticeable margin of the
well-known "fast" terminals. For example, Ghostty and Alacritty are usually within
a few percentage points of each other on various benchmarks, but are both
something like 100x faster than Terminal.app and iTerm. However, Ghostty
is much more feature rich than Alacritty and has a much more native app
experience.
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.
This performance is achieved through high-level architectural decisions and
low-level optimizations. At a high-level, Ghostty has a multi-threaded
architecture with a dedicated read thread, write thread, and render thread
per terminal. Our renderer uses OpenGL on Linux and Metal on macOS.
Our read thread has a heavily optimized terminal parser that leverages
CPU-specific SIMD instructions. Etc.
> [!NOTE]
> Despite being _very fast_, there is a lot of room for improvement here.
#### Richer Windowing Features
#### Rich Windowing Features
The Mac and Linux (build with GTK) apps support multi-window, tabbing, and
splits.
splits with additional features such as tab renaming, coloring, etc. These
features allow for a higher degree of organization and customization than
single-window terminals.
#### Native Platform Experiences
@@ -133,10 +132,15 @@ 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.
- macOS supports AppleScript, Apple Shortcuts (AppIntents), etc.
- The Linux app is built with GTK.
- The Linux app integrates deeply with systemd if available for things
like always-on, new windows in a single instance, cgroup isolation, etc.
There are more improvements to be made. The macOS settings window is still
a work-in-progress. Similar improvements will follow with Linux.
Our goal with Ghostty is for users of whatever platform they run Ghostty
on to think that Ghostty was built for their platform first and maybe even
exclusively. We want Ghostty to feel like a native app on every platform,
for the best definition of "native" on each platform.
#### Cross-platform `libghostty` for Embeddable Terminals
@@ -151,15 +155,34 @@ terminal state. This is covered in more detail in this
[blog post](https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming).
`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.
is compatible for macOS, Linux, Windows, and WebAssembly. The functionality
is extremely stable (since its been proven in Ghostty GUI for a long time),
but the API signatures are still in flux.
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.
`libghostty` is already heavily in use. See [`examples`](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/tree/main/example)
for small examples of using `libghostty` in C and Zig or the
[Ghostling](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling) project for a
complete example. See [awesome-libghostty](https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty)
for a list of projects and resources related to `libghostty`.
We haven't tagged libghostty with a version yet and we're still working
on a better docs experience, but our [Doxygen website](https://libghostty.tip.ghostty.org/)
is a good resource for the C API.
#### Ghostty-only Terminal Control Sequences
We want and believe that terminal applications can and should be able
to do so much more. We've worked hard to support a wide variety of modern
sequences created by other terminal emulators towards this end, but we also
want to fill the gaps by creating our own sequences.
We've been hesitant to do this up until now because we don't want to create
more fragmentation in the terminal ecosystem by creating sequences that only
work in Ghostty. But, we do want to balance that with the desire to push the
terminal forward with stagnant standards and the slow pace of change in the
terminal ecosystem.
We haven't done any of this yet.
## Crash Reports