Ghostling Libghostty Terminal

Ghostling — libghostty Terminal Emulator

Skill by ara.so — Daily 2026 Skills collection.

Ghostling is a minimal viable terminal emulator built on libghostty-vt, the embeddable C library extracted from Ghostty. It uses Raylib for windowing/rendering and lives in a single C file. The project demonstrates how to wire libghostty-vt's VT parsing, terminal state, and render-state API to any 2D or GPU renderer.

What libghostty-vt Provides

• VT sequence parsing (SIMD-optimized)
• Terminal state: cursor, styles, text reflow, scrollback
• Render state management (what cells changed and how to draw them)
• Unicode / multi-codepoint grapheme handling
• Kitty keyboard protocol, mouse tracking, focus reporting
• Zero dependencies (not even libc) — WASM-compatible

libghostty-vt does NOT provide: windowing, rendering, PTY management, tabs, splits, or configuration.

Requirements

Tool	Version
CMake	3.19+
Ninja	any
C compiler	clang/gcc
Zig	0.15.x (on PATH)
macOS	Xcode CLT or Xcode

Build & Run

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling.git
cd ghostling