ghostty

Ghostty is a terminal emulator—the app you use to type commands on your computer, like Terminal on Mac or Command Prompt on Windows. The key difference is that Ghostty is designed to be fast, look native to your operating system, and have lots of useful features, without forcing you to sacrifice one for the others.

When you open a terminal, you're essentially sending text commands to your computer and getting results back. Ghostty handles that conversation efficiently using modern graphics hardware (Metal on Mac, OpenGL on Linux) to make everything feel snappy and responsive. The project is written partly in Zig (a low-level programming language) and partly in platform-specific code—so on Mac it uses SwiftUI to look and feel like a real Mac app, and on Linux it uses GTK. This means Ghostty fits in naturally with whatever operating system you're using, rather than looking like a generic cross-platform tool.

Developers and power users would use this if they spend a lot of time in the terminal and want something that doesn't slow them down. It supports tabs, split panes, and multiple windows like tmux or iTerm2, but built-in rather than as an add-on. The creators also intend for Ghostty to work as a library called libghostty, so other apps (like code editors) could embed a terminal directly without building one from scratch.

The project is still in development. It's fully functional and people use it daily, but some features are still in progress—particularly Windows support and some native Mac preference panels. If Ghostty crashes, it keeps a local crash report on your computer that you can optionally share with the project if you want to help them fix bugs, though nothing is sent automatically.