ddidderr ce9373aa7a feat: visual parity with the original Ghostty (pixel-diff pipeline)
Adds scripts/visual-parity.sh (`just visual-parity`): launches the
installed Ghostty 1.3.1 and the Rust build in an isolated headless
nested weston (GL renderer, Mesa forced, weston-screenshooter via
--debug), with identical isolated config, a deterministic test page
(ASCII, ligatures, all SGR styles and underline kinds, 16/256/truecolor,
box/block/braille/powerline/nerd icons, CJK, emoji, wide chars,
cursor) and a tabs+splits scenario driven through Xwayland, then diffs
the captures (terminal area and chrome separately, heatmaps).

Fixes found by comparing against the original:
- A pane stayed blank after a nested split: the GTK render path called
  draw_frame(false) where Ghostty uses drawFrame(true) (a re-realized
  GLArea has a new swap chain that nothing else redraws).
- Sprite glyph antialiasing now ports z2d's default 4x4 multisample
  rasterizer instead of tiny-skia's analytic coverage (pixels differing
  from Ghostty's reference sprite sheets: 5.76% -> 1.20%, none off by
  more than 96 levels); the sheet test tolerance is tightened to 0.1%.

Result vs Ghostty 1.3.1: test page 0.020% of pixels differ (196 px at
curly-underline ends and diagonal box strokes, max delta 86 levels);
tabs+splits and headerbar/tab bar are bit-identical. Details in
docs/rewrite/notes/visual-parity-VP.md.

Test Plan:
- just visual-parity (needs weston, weston-screenshooter, xdotool)
- cargo test -p ghostty-font (sprite sheet comparison)
2026-10-12 13:52:22 +02:00
2026-10-11 21:27:49 +02:00
2026-10-11 21:27:49 +02:00
2026-10-11 21:27:49 +02:00
2026-10-11 21:27:49 +02:00
2026-10-11 21:27:49 +02:00

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.

Out of scope: macOS, Windows, WASM, the embedded libghostty C API, and Sentry crash reporting (disabled by default on Linux upstream).

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)

Development builds find resources/ (shell integration, themes, terminfo) automatically. 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).

Documentation

  • docs/rewrite/ARCHITECTURE.md – top-down decomposition, crate map, key design decisions, intentional omissions
  • docs/rewrite/STATUS.md – work package history
  • 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/themes/).

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