From Mitchell Hashimoto · · 2m
Libghostty 1.0 Launch
Libghostty 1.0, a portable C library for terminal emulation, now runs millions of terminals across products.
In brief
Libghostty 1.0, a portable C library for terminal emulation, now runs millions of terminals across products. Libghostty 1.0 provides stable terminal emulation for millions of users with a 1.0 release. Originally reported by Mitchell Hashimoto.
Libghostty 1.0 Release
Libghostty 1.0 is a portable, high-performance C library for terminal emulation, extracted directly from the core of Ghostty.
Who Uses Libghostty
JetBrains reports over 12.5 million active users of libghostty-powered terminals across IntelliJ, PyCharm, GoLand, etc.
Neovim Adoption
Neovim has an approved pull request replacing libvterm with libghostty-vt to fix a 10-year-old reflowing scrollback issue.
KDE and Vercel
KDE experiments with Konsole replacements built on libghostty, and Vercel's Turborepo uses it for task output rendering.
devenv and Antithesis
devenv drives shells using libghostty, and Antithesis uses it to fuzz TUI programs and find real bugs in btop.
Ghostel and ghostty-web
Ghostel brings libghostty to Emacs, and ghostty-web is the WASM build with an Xterm.js-compatible API.
Commercial Products
Commercial products like OrbStack embed libghostty, and new tools such as herdr and cmux are built on it.
Language Bindings
Libghostty has community bindings for Rust, Go, JavaScript, Swift, Python.NET, Elixir, Dart, Java, and more.
ABI Stability
Libghostty 1.0 follows semantic versioning with strict ABI compatibility promises for packagers and developers.
CI Enforcement
CI enforces ABI policy with libabigail checks on Linux, macOS, and WebAssembly against committed baselines.
Packaging
Libghostty releases include signed source tarballs, dependencies tarballs, and proper SONAME for OS packaging.
Dependencies
Libghostty uses MIT-licensed dependencies: simdutf, Google Highway, and Wuffs for Unicode and image decoding.
Portability
Libghostty runs on Linux, macOS, iOS, FreeBSD, Windows, Android, and WebAssembly with minimal resource usage.
Resource Usage
10,000 active terminals run on a 4-core, 8GB RAM server without thread creation or excessive memory.
What's Next
Libghostty will focus on stability while adding terminal protocols for embedders to choose from.
The main idea
Libghostty 1.0 provides stable terminal emulation for millions of users with a 1.0 release.
