ghostty-rs

A Rust rewrite of the Ghostty 1.3.1 terminal emulator for Linux (GTK4 + libadwaita, OpenGL).

It aims for behavioural parity with Ghostty: the same configuration file format, options, defaults and documentation; the same keybindings and actions; the same ghostty +action CLI; the same terminal emulation (including kitty keyboard/graphics protocols, OSC 8 hyperlinks, semantic prompts, synchronized output, tmux control mode); the same shell integration, themes and terminfo.

All of Ghostty's Zig code is ported: the Linux GTK app (verified at runtime and pixel-identical to Ghostty 1.3.1), the libghostty and libghostty-vt C APIs (same headers/ABI), WASM, crash reporting, and the macOS (Metal/CoreText) and Windows (ConPTY) code paths. macOS and Windows are compile-checked on Linux (just check-macos, just check-windows); the Windows test suites also run under Wine (just test-windows-wine), macOS has not been run natively. The Swift macOS app is not part of the port; it is a client of the libghostty C API.

Building and running

Requirements: Rust (edition 2024), GTK ≥ 4.14, libadwaita ≥ 1.5, fontconfig, freetype, harfbuzz, Oniguruma, libepoxy, blueprint-compiler and glib-compile-resources at build time.

cargo run                      # open a terminal window running your shell
cargo run -- -e htop           # run a command
cargo run -- +list-themes      # CLI actions work like Ghostty's
cargo run --profile production # optimized build (LTO, no debug assertions)

Dev-profile builds (cargo run) find resources/ (shell integration, themes, terminfo) automatically; other profiles use the installed resources or GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR. Your existing Ghostty config (~/.config/ghostty/config[.ghostty]) is used as-is.

Installing

just install /usr/local          # binary, share/ghostty, terminfo, desktop files,
                                 # completions, man pages, translations, icons
just install /usr false true     # system-package layout (lib/systemd/user)

Testing

just test      # cargo test --workspace (~3000 tests)
just clippy    # clippy with -D warnings

Every Zig test block of the ported files was ported to a Rust test. crates/ghostty-core/tests holds end-to-end tests that drive the real core, terminal and a real pty through a fake app runtime. ghostty-bench mirrors Ghostty's benchmark tool; terminal stream throughput is on par with the Zig build (see docs/rewrite/notes/perf-P1.md).

Verification

• just difftest — differential fuzzing of the terminal core against Ghostty's own Zig code (sets up Zig 0.15.2 under target/).
• just visual-parity — pixel comparison against the installed Ghostty in a headless nested weston.
• just test-windows-wine — runs the Windows test suites (incl. ConPTY / cmd.exe end-to-end tests) under Wine with mingw-w64.
• just check-all — native gate plus macOS/Windows/WASM checks.

Documentation

• docs/rewrite/ARCHITECTURE.md – top-down decomposition, crate map, key design decisions, intentional omissions
• docs/rewrite/STATUS.md – work package history
• docs/rewrite/DEVIANT_FIXES.md – every intentional deviation from Ghostty (upstream bugs fixed instead of replicated; commits titled fix-deviant(...))
• docs/rewrite/KNOWN_DIFFERENCES.md – remaining minor differences
• docs/rewrite/notes/ – per-crate porting notes, deviations from Zig, audits and verification reports

License

MIT, like Ghostty. Bundled fonts and themes carry their own licenses (see crates/ghostty-font/res/ and resources/LICENSE-iTerm2-Color-Schemes).