libghostty
Embeddable terminal emulator library extracted from the Ghostty terminal, for building terminal apps.
Liked as an embeddable terminal core for building custom terminal apps,123 including the ghostel Emacs terminal and a tool that packages TUIs as desktop apps.456 Commenters raise no complaints, and it suits developers building their own terminal frontends,78 especially for Emacs or AI coding agent workflows.910
Why people recommend it
Custom terminal apps · 3
Commenters have built their own terminal apps and chrome on top of it, including a daily-driver macOS terminal.
“I built my own macOS terminal app over the last two weeks using swift/appkit + ghostty's zig library.”
“a terminal emulator chrome that uses libghostty”
Show 1 more
“It really is quite an amazing piece of software.”
Emacs terminal · 2
It powers ghostel.el, which users call the nicest Emacs terminal and prefer over vterm.
Fixes refresh issues · 1
Switching from vterm to ghostel solved refresh issues one user had when running CLI coding agents in Emacs.
Just works · 1
One developer called it amazing software that just works when wrapped in a GUI, even on Windows.
“It really is quite an amazing piece of software.”
Enables new projects · 2
Commenters are excited that it enables projects like packaging TUIs as native desktop apps.
“Excited to see libghostty enabling projects like this”
“It really is quite an amazing piece of software.”
Caveats and dissent
No one in these comments warned against it.
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Ghostling 3 mentions
- Ghostty 1.4 2 mentions
- Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible 1 mention
Data: libghostty.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 6
“I love ghostty and libghostty.”
“Agreed on the value of libghostty.”
“a terminal emulator chrome that uses libghostty”
“I built my own macOS terminal app over the last two weeks using swift/appkit + ghostty's zig library.”
“Excited to see libghostty enabling projects like this”
“It really is quite an amazing piece of software.”