Ghostty

Judgement

What it is

Developer tool

What it does

A GPU-accelerated terminal emulator for macOS and Linux with a native interface on each platform, also available as the embeddable libghostty library.

Adopt it when

You want a fast terminal that looks and behaves like a native app on macOS or GTK Linux with sensible defaults.

Watch out

There is no Windows build, and it is configured through a text file rather than a settings screen.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Desktop app and library

Built with

Zig, Swift and C

How established

Established: started 4 years ago, no tagged release yet.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Ghostty → Zig → GCC → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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