fd3a62b9c1
This adds AppleScript support to the macOS app.
AppleScript is still one of the best ways to script macOS apps. It is
more CLI friendly and share-able than Apple Shortcuts and can be used by
other CLI programs like editors (Neovim plugins), launchers
(Raycast/Alfred), etc. It has been heavily requested to introduce more
scriptability into Ghostty and this is a really good, powerful option on
macOS.
> [!NOTE]
>
> I definitely still want to do something cross-platform and more
official as a plugin/scripting API for Ghostty. But native integrations
like this are a goal of Ghostty as well and this implementation is just
some thin logic over already existing internals to expose it.
I plan on merging this ahead of 1.3. Normally I wouldn't ship a feature
so late in the game but this is fairly hermetic (doesn't impact other
systems) and I plan on documenting it as a "preview" feature since the
API and stability are in question.
## Security
Apple secures AppleScript via TCC by asking for permission when a script
is run whether an app is allowed to be controlled. Because this is
always asked, we do default AppleScript to being enabled. This is
typical of macOS native applications already.
AppleScript can be wholesale disabled via `macos-applescript = false`.
## Future
There is a big question of what else to expose to this to make it
useful. I'm going to make a call to action for the 1.3 cycle to gather
feedback on this, since we can expose mostly anything!
## Capabilities
### Objects
| Object | Key Properties | Key Elements |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `application` | `name`, `frontmost`, `version` | `windows`,
`terminals` |
| `window` | `id`, `name`, `selected tab` | `tabs`, `terminals` |
| `tab` | `id`, `name`, `index`, `selected` | `terminals` |
| `terminal` | `id`, `name`, `working directory` | None |
### Commands
| Category | Command | Purpose |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Application | `perform action` | Execute a Ghostty action string on a
terminal. |
| Configuration | `new surface configuration` | Create/copy a reusable
surface configuration record. |
| Creation | `new window` | Open a new Ghostty window (optional
configuration). |
| Creation | `new tab` | Open a new tab (optional target
window/configuration). |
| Layout | `split` | Split a terminal and return the new terminal. |
| Focus/Selection | `focus` | Focus a terminal. |
| Focus/Selection | `activate window` | Bring a window to front and
activate app. |
| Focus/Selection | `select tab` | Select and foreground a tab. |
| Lifecycle | `close` | Close a terminal. |
| Lifecycle | `close tab` | Close a tab. |
| Lifecycle | `close window` | Close a window. |
| Input | `input text` | Paste-style text input into terminal. |
| Input | `send key` | Send key press/release with optional modifiers. |
| Input | `send mouse button` | Send mouse button press/release. |
| Input | `send mouse position` | Send mouse position update. |
| Input | `send mouse scroll` | Send scroll event with
precision/momentum options. |
| Standard Suite | `count`, `exists`, `quit` | Standard Cocoa scripting
functionality. |
## Examples
### Layout
```AppleScript
-- Tmux-like layout: 4 panes in one tab (2x2), each with a job.
set projectDir to POSIX path of (path to home folder) & "src/ghostty"
tell application "Ghostty"
activate
-- Reusable config for all panes.
set cfg to new surface configuration
set initial working directory of cfg to projectDir
-- Create the first window/tab + split into 4 panes.
set win to new window with configuration cfg
set paneEditor to terminal 1 of selected tab of win
set paneBuild to split paneEditor direction right with configuration cfg
set paneGit to split paneEditor direction down with configuration cfg
set paneLogs to split paneBuild direction down with configuration cfg
-- Seed each pane with a command.
input text "nvim ." to paneEditor
send key "enter" to paneEditor
input text "zig build -Demit-macos-app=false" to paneBuild
input text "git status -sb" to paneGit
input text "tail -f /tmp/dev.log" to paneLogs
send key "enter" to paneLogs
-- Put focus back where you want to type.
focus paneEditor
end tell
```
### Broadcast Commands
```AppleScript
-- Run one command across every open terminal surface.
set cmd to "echo sync && date"
tell application "Ghostty"
set allTerms to terminals
repeat with t in allTerms
input text cmd to t
send key "enter" to t
end repeat
display dialog ("Broadcasted to " & (count of allTerms) & " terminal(s).")
end tell
```
### Jump by Working Directory
```applescript
-- Find the first terminal whose cwd contains this text.
set needle to "ghostty"
tell application "Ghostty"
set matches to every terminal whose working directory contains needle
-- Fallback: try title if cwd had no match.
if (count of matches) = 0 then
set matches to every terminal whose name contains needle
end if
if (count of matches) = 0 then
display dialog ("No terminal matched: " & needle)
else
set t to item 1 of matches
focus terminal t
input text "echo '[focused by AppleScript]'" to t
send key "enter" to t
end if
end tell
```
Ghostty
Fast, native, feature-rich terminal emulator pushing modern features.
About
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Download
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Documentation
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Contributing
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Developing
About
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.
Download
See the download page on the Ghostty website.
Documentation
See the documentation on the Ghostty website.
Contributing and Developing
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.
Roadmap and Status
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) | ❌ |
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 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."
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.
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.
Note
Despite being very fast, there is a lot of room for improvement here.
Richer Windowing Features
The Mac and Linux (build with GTK) apps support multi-window, tabbing, and splits.
Native Platform Experiences
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.
Cross-platform libghostty for Embeddable Terminals
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.
Crash Reports
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.
Note
Use the
ghostty +crash-reportCLI command to get a list of available crash reports. A future version of Ghostty will make the contents of the crash reports more easily viewable through the CLI and GUI.
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>
Warning
The crash report can contain sensitive information. The report doesn't purposely contain sensitive information, but it does contain the full stack memory of each thread at the time of the crash. This information is used to rebuild the stack trace but can also contain sensitive data depending on when the crash occurred.