JetBrains' 12.5 million users now run a terminal built on libghostty
Libghostty 1.0
libghostty-vt 1.0 ships a stable C ABI for the terminal emulator at the heart of Ghostty. JetBrains IDEs already run it for over 12.5 million active users, Neovim has an approved PR to replace libvterm, and KDE, Vercel, and OrbStack are building on it. The MIT-licensed library needs only libc at runtime, builds across Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and WebAssembly, and enforces ABI compatibility in CI with libabigail.
More people today use a terminal powered by libghostty than use Ghostty the application, by a very large multiple.
- jdorfman
> “And a whole wave of new terminals and "agentic" coding tools, such as herdr and cmux, have been built on it rather than writing yet another emulator.”
Mitchell could have easily snuck his competing product Rex in there but resisted. Respect.
- smj-edison
I'm currently working on my own Zig project (an interpreter) and right now I'm working on designing a C interface for it. Seeing things mentioned like having objects as opaque handles, or enum-keyed getters and setters, made me think about how clunky my current API is, since I leak too many details to callers.
What really caught my attention was this: "So from the start, I took inspiration from C libraries I enjoyed working with and designed the API to have a strong, stable ABI that allows for future additions." What are good examples of this? I feel like I just don't have enough experience with well-designed C libraries to know what to look for.
- JuniperMesos
Libghostty is a very cool project, this is an exciting release, kudos to mitchellh for spearheading this as well as all the people who have made contributions to the project. I use ghostty as my primary terminal emulator today and a few months ago I was experimenting with using libghostty in an android project that I plan to jump back to someday when I have the time, so I personally benefit from this work.
- nigehban
I was using ghostty since its beginning, then Mitchell has shown the capability of rendering for kitty and I installed the kitty, dropped everything else. maybe statistically is not correct but I feel the transitions, animations, rendering of the kitty terminal is superior than ghostty. I only miss some fancy window/pane layout settings (not sure kitty does have a window at all) and naming. Other than that kitty is my daily driver for any Agentic env.
PS: FMPOV Mitchell is a relentless performance addict. I have been seeing this since the vagrant days (this also makes me sad because it reminds me I am getting old)
- spudlyo
One area where Ghostty really shines is with fancy TUI programs like the pi agent. Pi has a relatively recent tuiMode "fullscreen" feature, and it's been exceptional. Showing inline images with the Kitty graphics protocol has been a huge improvement too -- I love it when a model calls `read` on an image file and I get to see the results in my terminal. The OSC-8 hyperlink support very handy too. Viewport scrolling is super fast, and pi can hide/show the scrollbar as you need it.
- ximm
> Every bug any libghostty-vt embedder reports makes everyone else in the ecosystem better. Every feature we ship in libghostty-vt becomes available to everyone quickly and safely. Terminals can move faster with less fragmentation.
Can anyone give a comparison to libvte? There are many terminals that are just thin wrapper around that (gnome-terminal, xfce4-terminal, mate-terminal, lxterminal, sakura, …). It is tied to GTK, so it has a much narrower scope. But still it feels related in spirit.
- amterp
Libghostty is such an awesome project, I didn't myself understand the vision a year ago but I've since then been working on my own terminal project using Libghostty and it really does just work and save me such a tremendous amount of work. Kudos to all the contributors!
- IlikeMadison
Libghostty made the best terminal for Emacs possible (Ghostel). Thank you Mitchell.