5 ms·

Ghostling

333 points by bjornroberg 7mo ago

vintagedave 7mo ago
The C file is small enough to read (over a few minutes.) I got to about line 5 and realized: I’ve never seen quite that technique for embedding a font via an autogenerated header before. I’m more used to Windows resources; this seems to generate a byte array in CMake code. I’m somewhere between horrified and impressed, in that I feel we’ve finally discovered a cross platform binary resource embedding solution.
- vintagedave 7mo ago
  And as a Windows programmer the use of a method called DrawTextEx surprised me :) A really neat sample. Shows the power of the ghosttty library very well. The author chose well with their other libraries, it’s the kind of demo that lets the code actually demo what to trying to without much else getting in the way. Rather inspirational to wrote my own terminal app now.
- fresh_broccoli 7mo ago
  Fun fact: XPM bitmaps were designed to be #included unmodified, the files contain C boilerplate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap
- simonw 7mo ago
  Here's the build script that uses: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling/blob/main/bin2header.cmake https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling/blob/main/bin2heade... I ran it against a 1x1 pixel GIF: cmake -DINPUT=pixel.gif -DOUTPUT=pixel.h -DARRAY_NAME=pixel_gif -P bin2header.cmake And got this: // Auto-generated from /private/tmp/exp/pixel.gif — do not edit. static const unsigned char pixel_gif[] = { 0x47, 0x49, 0x46, 0x38, 0x39, 0x61, 0x01, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x80, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x2c, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x02, 0x44, 0x01, 0x00, 0x3b };
  - flohofwoe 7mo ago
    Interestingly, cmake 4.3 just added a builtin command 'bin2c': https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v4.3/manual/cmake.1.html#cmdoption-cmake-E-arg-bin2c https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v4.3/manual/cmake.1.html#cmdopt... ...it will probably take a decade or two until Debian-based Linux distros will get cmake 4.3 though ;)
- kingforaday 7mo ago
  For cross-compilation ease it makes sense if you don't care about the size explosion.
- electroly 7mo ago
  You can use `xxd` from the vim package to generate these. You'll find out pretty quickly that this is only suitable for small resources: gcc and clang blow up in both time and space on very large literal arrays. If you need to ship more than a few megabytes, find a different technique. I used this technique for awhile, but it was too problematic for my use case. Now, I use https://github.com/lief-project/LIEF https://github.com/lief-project/LIEF -- among other things, this project can modify Windows PE, macOS Mach-O, and Linux ELF binaries to add resources to them, then offers an API to read them back later. It's a little different for each format, but it's capable of doing all three and I was able to build a cross-platform resource-bundling system that doesn't care how big the resources are.
  - rweichler 7mo ago
    Yeah xxd is the correct answer. If you don't want to install a dependency and have Lua installed, or if you're just feeling a little bit frisky, you can use my function which is Production Ready™. Xxd = function(name, input) if not name:find'^[_%a][_%w]*$' then error('bad name: '..tostring(name)) end local ans = { 'const unsigned int '..name..'_len = '..(#input)..';', 'const unsigned char '..name..'[] = {', } local t = {} for i=1,#input do table.insert(t, ('0x%02x,'):format(input:byte(i))) if #t == 16 then -- 16 columns per row. arbitrary, change this if you want table.insert(ans, table.concat(t)) t = {} end end if #t ~= 0 then table.insert(ans, table.concat(t)) end table.insert(ans, '};\n') return table.concat(ans, '\n') end I am distributing it under the terms of the GNU GPL v3. So if you put this in your codebase I will sue you into releasing your entire source. Just kidding it's MIT licensed. Honestly that's a terrible joke. Seriously it's MIT. Here I will put the full license in this comment to illustrate how serious I am: Copyright 2026 rweichler Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago
  > I’m somewhere between horrified and impressed, in that I feel we’ve finally discovered a cross platform binary resource embedding solution. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment about having "finally discovered" that... For to me embedding binary resources in source files is nothing new at all? It was definitely done in the early JavaScript days for a variety of reasons. Arguably early basic listings that had lots of DATA text lines were already doing that. Maybe not the most portable but we're talking about the 70s and 80s here and definitely binary data in source code. Games for the Atari ST and Amiga, for example, could partially share at least some of their source code and it wasn't uncommon to encode binary inside sources, including... Fonts! Back then fonts were not reused from one game to another. Heck, I've done in Java (and Java is cross platform) in the past: quick visual debug tools for Java GUI apps to toggle a debug mode showing something not dissimilar to a HUD. Pixel-perfect fonts encoded in .java source files. I really don't think it's anything new. P.S: I'm pretty sure it's done like for some fonts in the Linux kernel too.
  - jrmg 7mo ago
    `man xxd`
  - vintagedave 7mo ago
    "Finally discovered" was more that there are so many difference ways, all of which work differently. Maybe this is just adding one more technique, xkcd-style, but it struck me as more possibly cross-platform-identical than several techniques I've seen. If you embed Windows resources, for example, that's highly Windows-specific; this one would work regardless.
- mitchellh 7mo ago
  Well, I originally used C23's #embed directive (https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/preprocessor/embed https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/preprocessor/embed) but GCC in Nixpkgs doesn't support C23 (or I'm holding it wrong) so I dropped back to this. The better long term solution is #embed.
  - poly2it 7mo ago
    I've definitely used C23 via Nixpkgs long ago at this point, did you use the `gcc` package and `-std=c23`? Both unstable and 25.11 should support it on all currently packaged GCC versions.
- conradev 7mo ago
  I think this has been around for a while: $ echo 'test' | xxd -i -n foo unsigned char foo[] = { 0x74, 0x65, 0x73, 0x74, 0x0a }; unsigned int foo_len = 5; (edit: 30 years)
- w4rh4wk5 7mo ago
  For completeness, there's also the somewhat common way of creating an object file directly from the binary using objcopy. The object file ends up with 3 symbols with names based on the input file. For instance, a binary file level0.map yields: _binary_level0_map_start, _binary_level0_map_end, _binary_level0_map_size. These can be used in the application through external declarations; and you include the object file in the linking step, like any other object file.
- gucci-on-fleek 7mo ago
  My preferred technique (where #embed isn't available) is to use objcopy: $ echo 'Hello, world!' > hello-world.txt $ objcopy --input-target=binary --output-target=elf64-x86-64 \ hello-world.txt hello-world.o $ cat <<EOF > embed.c #include <stdint.h> #include <stdio.h> #define EMBED(NAME) \ extern const uint8_t _binary_##NAME##_start[]; \ extern const uint8_t _binary_##NAME##_size[]; #define DATA(NAME) _binary_##NAME##_start #define SIZE(NAME) (size_t)_binary_##NAME##_size int main() { EMBED(hello_world_txt); printf("%.*s", (int)SIZE(hello_world_txt), DATA(hello_world_txt)); } EOF $ gcc hello-world.o embed.c -o hello-world $ ./hello-world Hello, world!
oDot 7mo ago
I use libghostty for Trolley[0], which packages TUIs as desktop apps, like Electron does for web apps. It really is quite an amazing piece of software. I just wrapped it in a useful GUI and a bundle/package CLI and it just works. Even on Windows. Kudos to the Ghostty developers. [0] https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley
- nout 7mo ago
  I think your github readme is really missing a picture/screenshot to quickly understand what is the experience like. I.e. if your app is mainly about adding the chrome (as in the surrounding UI pixels) around the TUI, then it would be good to show what is the chrome like.
  - cstrahan 7mo ago
    Nah, I think it’s pretty clear. It would look like a terminal emulator. Just like how Electron looks like a bunch of browser widgets - because it’s literally a single-web-app browser.
    - nout 7mo ago
      Does it have any extra controls? And is it using native windows (as opposed to Electron)?
    - theblazehen 7mo ago
      A screenshot would still make it clear that that's all you're getting - and no extra chrome etc
    - qn9n 6mo ago
      I agree a screenshot or even better a video of lazygit, btop or something similar running in the tui side by side with the trolley app
- theowaway213456 7mo ago
  This is a pretty cool idea. Kind of a neat distribution hack if all you have is a TUI (and not a full GUI). Curious whether you know of any success stories yet
imiric 7mo ago
This looks interesting. I don't need my terminal emulator to support tabs, windows, or session management. My WM manages tabs and windows, and I use tmux for sessions, which also gives me a scrollback buffer, selection, clipboard, search, etc. This combination allows me to use any simple terminal emulator, such as urxvt, st, and now foot, without issues. Ghostty didn't appeal to me, but I might give this a try. It's good that OSC support is planned. A plugin-like system, similar to st's but less cumbersome, would be nice to have.
- nixpulvis 7mo ago
  It's comical how much time I've spent convincing people that tabs are a window manager feature not an application feature. People in the Alacritty issue on the subject were pissed!
  - theowaway213456 7mo ago
    Are there any good, non-tiling window managers that support tabs? (I struggle with tiling ones like i3 because I am a small-brained mouse user)
    - skulk 7mo ago
      Maybe you'd like Niri? https://github.com/niri-wm/niri https://github.com/niri-wm/niri
    - nixpulvis 7mo ago
      I mean, macOS supports tabs now. I wouldn't call it "good" though.
    - ecliptik 7mo ago
      Fluxbox has tabs and is a stacking window manager. - https://fluxbox.org/features/ https://fluxbox.org/features/
  - eddythompson80 7mo ago
    Yes, we need tabs for RDR2 and Spotify.
lzhgusapp 7mo ago
I switched to Ghostty a few months ago and it's become one of the apps I never close. The rendering speed is noticeably better than iTerm2, especially with large log outputs. Excited to see libghostty enabling projects like this — the idea of packaging TUIs as native desktop apps is really compelling for indie developers.
lindskogen 7mo ago
I have an idea of a terminal emulator where you could maximize panes but using a nested structure, does anyone know of one? Standard "Zoom" features in tmux or iTerm2 only maximize the single active pane to the full window, hiding everything else. If I have a layout like this: _____________________ | | B | | A |---------| | | C | |_________|_________| And I expand B, I want A to hide, while B and C remain visible together. Then I can create a new nested workspace in there and later zoom out when I’m done. Maybe this could be done arbitrarily deep?
- aquariusDue 7mo ago
  It's not really what you want but in a similar vein check out: zoom.el https://github.com/cyrus-and/zoom https://github.com/cyrus-and/zoom I guess it's also the kind of thing where screen real-estate is a must otherwise when you're at the "top-level" it would look weird-ish.
- 0x696C6961 7mo ago
  You can do this with i3
- ramon156 7mo ago
  Wouldn't you want a hide option rather than a fullscreen option? so hide A? When I use zellij, i just move A to a new tab temporarily
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  This should be simple any time you have panes in a binary tree split view. The hard part is the UX: making it clear that we're in a zoom state (esp with nested zooms), somehow showing the split-pane tree so that user knows what container will be filled when they zoom, etc. Fork ghostty and get claude to one-shot it so you can see if you like the idea.
znpy 7mo ago
I’m seriously interested in this. I wonder if i can use this along some decent gui library and an llm to vibe-code a SecureCRT replacement. SecureCRT is awesome but it’s crazy expensive :(
thiht 7mo ago
I really hope libghostty succeeds at setting a new baseline for what terminal emulation should be. Seems to be on a right track.
CraigJPerry 7mo ago
I used ghostty for the shell in my agent-manager tool (think something like https://air.dev/ https://air.dev/ but in SwiftUI. One architectural detail i'm still going back and forth on is: who should own the PTY? If embedded Ghostty owns it, now i have to have some kind of workaround to instrument what's happening inside the terminal - signals, stdout/stderr events, return code etc. If my parent agent-manager app owns it, now i don't have the nice clean small interface to ghostty (i'm a fan of John Ousterhout style narrow but deep interfaces, pulling complexity down rather than pushing up to parent). Not sure if any other ghostty embedders might have advice. It's on my todo list to task a an agent to "gh repo clone" a few ghostty using shells and report on their arch.
- willrshansen 7mo ago
  Sounds like you need to multiplex a terminal with a terminal multiplexer. terminal multiplexer term mux tmux
mococa 7mo ago
I have plans to add it to my game (SDL).
hombre_fatal 7mo ago
I built my own macOS terminal app over the last two weeks using swift/appkit + ghostty's zig library. I basically just wanted vertical tabs and notifications for when AI agents (claude code, codex) are finished. I already use it as my main terminal over iTerm. It's a fun project since I use my terminal all day, so I always have ideas for how something could be improved or polished. AI can do the chore work of figuring out how to impl some bugfix or UX polish, and I manage the last 10%. This would have been too much work to maintain for fun before LLMs.
- vunderba 7mo ago
  FWIW most of the agentic CLI tools also let you setup notification hooks so you can just do something like this: afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff osascript -e 'display notification "Waiting..." with title "Coding Agent" The sound is especially useful since for longer running tasks I'll often do some chores around the house while waiting for it to finish up.
  - hombre_fatal 7mo ago
    My notification hook pipes an OSC 777 (title, body) message into /dev/tty, Ghostty handles/ingests it and then emits the event for my terminal app to do things like craft a macOS notif and style the tab/pane of the originating terminal. #!/usr/bin/env bash MSG=$(cat | jq -r '.last_assistant_message // empty' | head -c 200) printf '\e]777;notify;Claude Code;%s\a' "${MSG:-Claude finished responding}" > /dev/tty I tried the osascript solution first but had some issues, iirc no good way to focus the originating terminal pane on notif click. Something I never figured out is why Claude Code's "Notification" hook waits minutes to fire. I had to use the "Stop" hook for actual end-of-response timing.
    - vunderba 7mo ago
      > iirc no way to focus the originating terminal pane on notif click. Yeah mine has the same issue - it just brings up the script editor. It's not as much of an issue for me since I'm rarely running more than a single Opencode instance at a time. Could definitely see that being useful if you were running quite a few agents to let you hone in on the correct terminal window/tab quickly though.
echelon 7mo ago
I love seeing an `AGENTS.md` in open source projects. It's now my #1 heuristic to know if the team is on the right track. (I need to start adding them to all my projects.)
octetta 7mo ago
This is amazing and might be exactly what I’m looking for my own weirdo retro tooling that sometimes needs to run over ssh but also expect a “GUI” experience… any metrics on the overhead this might add to, for instance to a hello world type program?

333 points by bjornroberg 7mo ago

The C file is small enough to read (over a few minutes.) I got to about line 5 and realized: I’ve never seen quite that technique for embedding a font via an autogenerated header before. I’m more used to Windows resources; this seems to generate a byte array in CMake code. I’m somewhere between horrified and impressed, in that I feel we’ve finally discovered a cross platform binary resource embedding solution.

vintagedave 7mo ago
And as a Windows programmer the use of a method called DrawTextEx surprised me :) A really neat sample. Shows the power of the ghosttty library very well. The author chose well with their other libraries, it’s the kind of demo that lets the code actually demo what to trying to without much else getting in the way. Rather inspirational to wrote my own terminal app now.
fresh_broccoli 7mo ago
Fun fact: XPM bitmaps were designed to be #included unmodified, the files contain C boilerplate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap
simonw 7mo ago
Here's the build script that uses: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling/blob/main/bin2header.cmake https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling/blob/main/bin2heade... I ran it against a 1x1 pixel GIF: cmake -DINPUT=pixel.gif -DOUTPUT=pixel.h -DARRAY_NAME=pixel_gif -P bin2header.cmake And got this: // Auto-generated from /private/tmp/exp/pixel.gif — do not edit. static const unsigned char pixel_gif[] = { 0x47, 0x49, 0x46, 0x38, 0x39, 0x61, 0x01, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x80, 0x00, 0x00, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x2c, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x02, 0x44, 0x01, 0x00, 0x3b };
- flohofwoe 7mo ago
  Interestingly, cmake 4.3 just added a builtin command 'bin2c': https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v4.3/manual/cmake.1.html#cmdoption-cmake-E-arg-bin2c https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v4.3/manual/cmake.1.html#cmdopt... ...it will probably take a decade or two until Debian-based Linux distros will get cmake 4.3 though ;)
kingforaday 7mo ago
For cross-compilation ease it makes sense if you don't care about the size explosion.
electroly 7mo ago
You can use `xxd` from the vim package to generate these. You'll find out pretty quickly that this is only suitable for small resources: gcc and clang blow up in both time and space on very large literal arrays. If you need to ship more than a few megabytes, find a different technique. I used this technique for awhile, but it was too problematic for my use case. Now, I use https://github.com/lief-project/LIEF https://github.com/lief-project/LIEF -- among other things, this project can modify Windows PE, macOS Mach-O, and Linux ELF binaries to add resources to them, then offers an API to read them back later. It's a little different for each format, but it's capable of doing all three and I was able to build a cross-platform resource-bundling system that doesn't care how big the resources are.
- rweichler 7mo ago
  Yeah xxd is the correct answer. If you don't want to install a dependency and have Lua installed, or if you're just feeling a little bit frisky, you can use my function which is Production Ready™. Xxd = function(name, input) if not name:find'^[_%a][_%w]*$' then error('bad name: '..tostring(name)) end local ans = { 'const unsigned int '..name..'_len = '..(#input)..';', 'const unsigned char '..name..'[] = {', } local t = {} for i=1,#input do table.insert(t, ('0x%02x,'):format(input:byte(i))) if #t == 16 then -- 16 columns per row. arbitrary, change this if you want table.insert(ans, table.concat(t)) t = {} end end if #t ~= 0 then table.insert(ans, table.concat(t)) end table.insert(ans, '};\n') return table.concat(ans, '\n') end I am distributing it under the terms of the GNU GPL v3. So if you put this in your codebase I will sue you into releasing your entire source. Just kidding it's MIT licensed. Honestly that's a terrible joke. Seriously it's MIT. Here I will put the full license in this comment to illustrate how serious I am: Copyright 2026 rweichler Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
TacticalCoder 7mo ago
> I’m somewhere between horrified and impressed, in that I feel we’ve finally discovered a cross platform binary resource embedding solution. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment about having "finally discovered" that... For to me embedding binary resources in source files is nothing new at all? It was definitely done in the early JavaScript days for a variety of reasons. Arguably early basic listings that had lots of DATA text lines were already doing that. Maybe not the most portable but we're talking about the 70s and 80s here and definitely binary data in source code. Games for the Atari ST and Amiga, for example, could partially share at least some of their source code and it wasn't uncommon to encode binary inside sources, including... Fonts! Back then fonts were not reused from one game to another. Heck, I've done in Java (and Java is cross platform) in the past: quick visual debug tools for Java GUI apps to toggle a debug mode showing something not dissimilar to a HUD. Pixel-perfect fonts encoded in .java source files. I really don't think it's anything new. P.S: I'm pretty sure it's done like for some fonts in the Linux kernel too.
- jrmg 7mo ago
  `man xxd`
- vintagedave 7mo ago
  "Finally discovered" was more that there are so many difference ways, all of which work differently. Maybe this is just adding one more technique, xkcd-style, but it struck me as more possibly cross-platform-identical than several techniques I've seen. If you embed Windows resources, for example, that's highly Windows-specific; this one would work regardless.
mitchellh 7mo ago
Well, I originally used C23's #embed directive (https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/preprocessor/embed https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/preprocessor/embed) but GCC in Nixpkgs doesn't support C23 (or I'm holding it wrong) so I dropped back to this. The better long term solution is #embed.
- poly2it 7mo ago
  I've definitely used C23 via Nixpkgs long ago at this point, did you use the `gcc` package and `-std=c23`? Both unstable and 25.11 should support it on all currently packaged GCC versions.
conradev 7mo ago
I think this has been around for a while: $ echo 'test' | xxd -i -n foo unsigned char foo[] = { 0x74, 0x65, 0x73, 0x74, 0x0a }; unsigned int foo_len = 5; (edit: 30 years)
w4rh4wk5 7mo ago
For completeness, there's also the somewhat common way of creating an object file directly from the binary using objcopy. The object file ends up with 3 symbols with names based on the input file. For instance, a binary file level0.map yields: _binary_level0_map_start, _binary_level0_map_end, _binary_level0_map_size. These can be used in the application through external declarations; and you include the object file in the linking step, like any other object file.
gucci-on-fleek 7mo ago
My preferred technique (where #embed isn't available) is to use objcopy: $ echo 'Hello, world!' > hello-world.txt $ objcopy --input-target=binary --output-target=elf64-x86-64 \ hello-world.txt hello-world.o $ cat <<EOF > embed.c #include <stdint.h> #include <stdio.h> #define EMBED(NAME) \ extern const uint8_t _binary_##NAME##_start[]; \ extern const uint8_t _binary_##NAME##_size[]; #define DATA(NAME) _binary_##NAME##_start #define SIZE(NAME) (size_t)_binary_##NAME##_size int main() { EMBED(hello_world_txt); printf("%.*s", (int)SIZE(hello_world_txt), DATA(hello_world_txt)); } EOF $ gcc hello-world.o embed.c -o hello-world $ ./hello-world Hello, world!

oDot 7mo ago

I use libghostty for Trolley[0], which packages TUIs as desktop apps, like Electron does for web apps. It really is quite an amazing piece of software. I just wrapped it in a useful GUI and a bundle/package CLI and it just works. Even on Windows. Kudos to the Ghostty developers. [0] https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

nout 7mo ago
I think your github readme is really missing a picture/screenshot to quickly understand what is the experience like. I.e. if your app is mainly about adding the chrome (as in the surrounding UI pixels) around the TUI, then it would be good to show what is the chrome like.
- cstrahan 7mo ago
  Nah, I think it’s pretty clear. It would look like a terminal emulator. Just like how Electron looks like a bunch of browser widgets - because it’s literally a single-web-app browser.
  - nout 7mo ago
    Does it have any extra controls? And is it using native windows (as opposed to Electron)?
  - theblazehen 7mo ago
    A screenshot would still make it clear that that's all you're getting - and no extra chrome etc
  - qn9n 6mo ago
    I agree a screenshot or even better a video of lazygit, btop or something similar running in the tui side by side with the trolley app
theowaway213456 7mo ago
This is a pretty cool idea. Kind of a neat distribution hack if all you have is a TUI (and not a full GUI). Curious whether you know of any success stories yet

imiric 7mo ago

This looks interesting. I don't need my terminal emulator to support tabs, windows, or session management. My WM manages tabs and windows, and I use tmux for sessions, which also gives me a scrollback buffer, selection, clipboard, search, etc. This combination allows me to use any simple terminal emulator, such as urxvt, st, and now foot, without issues. Ghostty didn't appeal to me, but I might give this a try. It's good that OSC support is planned. A plugin-like system, similar to st's but less cumbersome, would be nice to have.

nixpulvis 7mo ago
It's comical how much time I've spent convincing people that tabs are a window manager feature not an application feature. People in the Alacritty issue on the subject were pissed!
- theowaway213456 7mo ago
  Are there any good, non-tiling window managers that support tabs? (I struggle with tiling ones like i3 because I am a small-brained mouse user)
  - skulk 7mo ago
    Maybe you'd like Niri? https://github.com/niri-wm/niri https://github.com/niri-wm/niri
  - nixpulvis 7mo ago
    I mean, macOS supports tabs now. I wouldn't call it "good" though.
  - ecliptik 7mo ago
    Fluxbox has tabs and is a stacking window manager. - https://fluxbox.org/features/ https://fluxbox.org/features/
- eddythompson80 7mo ago
  Yes, we need tabs for RDR2 and Spotify.

lzhgusapp 7mo ago

I switched to Ghostty a few months ago and it's become one of the apps I never close. The rendering speed is noticeably better than iTerm2, especially with large log outputs. Excited to see libghostty enabling projects like this — the idea of packaging TUIs as native desktop apps is really compelling for indie developers.

lindskogen 7mo ago

I have an idea of a terminal emulator where you could maximize panes but using a nested structure, does anyone know of one? Standard "Zoom" features in tmux or iTerm2 only maximize the single active pane to the full window, hiding everything else. If I have a layout like this: _____________________ | | B | | A |---------| | | C | |_________|_________| And I expand B, I want A to hide, while B and C remain visible together. Then I can create a new nested workspace in there and later zoom out when I’m done. Maybe this could be done arbitrarily deep?

aquariusDue 7mo ago
It's not really what you want but in a similar vein check out: zoom.el https://github.com/cyrus-and/zoom https://github.com/cyrus-and/zoom I guess it's also the kind of thing where screen real-estate is a must otherwise when you're at the "top-level" it would look weird-ish.
0x696C6961 7mo ago
You can do this with i3
ramon156 7mo ago
Wouldn't you want a hide option rather than a fullscreen option? so hide A? When I use zellij, i just move A to a new tab temporarily
deleted 7mo ago
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hombre_fatal 7mo ago
This should be simple any time you have panes in a binary tree split view. The hard part is the UX: making it clear that we're in a zoom state (esp with nested zooms), somehow showing the split-pane tree so that user knows what container will be filled when they zoom, etc. Fork ghostty and get claude to one-shot it so you can see if you like the idea.

znpy 7mo ago

I’m seriously interested in this. I wonder if i can use this along some decent gui library and an llm to vibe-code a SecureCRT replacement. SecureCRT is awesome but it’s crazy expensive :(

thiht 7mo ago

I really hope libghostty succeeds at setting a new baseline for what terminal emulation should be. Seems to be on a right track.

CraigJPerry 7mo ago

I used ghostty for the shell in my agent-manager tool (think something like https://air.dev/ https://air.dev/ but in SwiftUI. One architectural detail i'm still going back and forth on is: who should own the PTY? If embedded Ghostty owns it, now i have to have some kind of workaround to instrument what's happening inside the terminal - signals, stdout/stderr events, return code etc. If my parent agent-manager app owns it, now i don't have the nice clean small interface to ghostty (i'm a fan of John Ousterhout style narrow but deep interfaces, pulling complexity down rather than pushing up to parent). Not sure if any other ghostty embedders might have advice. It's on my todo list to task a an agent to "gh repo clone" a few ghostty using shells and report on their arch.

willrshansen 7mo ago
Sounds like you need to multiplex a terminal with a terminal multiplexer. terminal multiplexer term mux tmux

mococa 7mo ago

I have plans to add it to my game (SDL).

hombre_fatal 7mo ago

I built my own macOS terminal app over the last two weeks using swift/appkit + ghostty's zig library. I basically just wanted vertical tabs and notifications for when AI agents (claude code, codex) are finished. I already use it as my main terminal over iTerm. It's a fun project since I use my terminal all day, so I always have ideas for how something could be improved or polished. AI can do the chore work of figuring out how to impl some bugfix or UX polish, and I manage the last 10%. This would have been too much work to maintain for fun before LLMs.

vunderba 7mo ago
FWIW most of the agentic CLI tools also let you setup notification hooks so you can just do something like this: afplay /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff osascript -e 'display notification "Waiting..." with title "Coding Agent" The sound is especially useful since for longer running tasks I'll often do some chores around the house while waiting for it to finish up.
- hombre_fatal 7mo ago
  My notification hook pipes an OSC 777 (title, body) message into /dev/tty, Ghostty handles/ingests it and then emits the event for my terminal app to do things like craft a macOS notif and style the tab/pane of the originating terminal. #!/usr/bin/env bash MSG=$(cat | jq -r '.last_assistant_message // empty' | head -c 200) printf '\e]777;notify;Claude Code;%s\a' "${MSG:-Claude finished responding}" > /dev/tty I tried the osascript solution first but had some issues, iirc no good way to focus the originating terminal pane on notif click. Something I never figured out is why Claude Code's "Notification" hook waits minutes to fire. I had to use the "Stop" hook for actual end-of-response timing.
  - vunderba 7mo ago
    > iirc no way to focus the originating terminal pane on notif click. Yeah mine has the same issue - it just brings up the script editor. It's not as much of an issue for me since I'm rarely running more than a single Opencode instance at a time. Could definitely see that being useful if you were running quite a few agents to let you hone in on the correct terminal window/tab quickly though.

echelon 7mo ago

I love seeing an `AGENTS.md` in open source projects. It's now my #1 heuristic to know if the team is on the right track. (I need to start adding them to all my projects.)

octetta 7mo ago

This is amazing and might be exactly what I’m looking for my own weirdo retro tooling that sometimes needs to run over ssh but also expect a “GUI” experience… any metrics on the overhead this might add to, for instance to a hello world type program?