Ghostty 1.0 is out.

If you told me two years ago that I would be releasing a terminal emulator, I wouldn't have believed you. I've always been a fan of the terminal, my entire career was built around shipping terminal-first software. But they're a solved problem, right? That's what I thought.

I started the project in 2022 merely as a way to play with Zig, do some graphics programming, and deepen my understanding of terminals. I never intended to release it. I didn't think there was innovation to be had. I thought I would learn a lot over a few months and move on.

But as I worked on it, I looked at other terminals differently. I saw tradeoffs that I didn't like. I saw features that I wanted. I saw performance that I could improve. I saw stagnation. There are many fantastic terminals out there and you should use them if they work for you. But I wanted something different and thought maybe others did too.

And so Ghostty was born. It's not perfect, it's not done, it's not for everyone. But it's mine. It's a reflection of my values and my vision for what a terminal could be.

The Private Beta

The most controversial part of Ghostty was the private beta. Oh boy, the private beta. I vastly underestimated the effect this would have on the project. Good and bad.

The Private Beta: The Good

First, why a private beta? The primary reason was to manage my own personal bandwidth. I began publicly sharing the project shortly before my first child was born. I have experience launching software and I knew the stress that comes with it. I wanted to avoid that stress and be able to focus on my family. I felt I could curate a small group of interested users to throttle issues, only increasing the user base as I felt comfortable.

A secondary, but much less important reason was that I felt a terminal emulator more than most software either works or it doesn't. You can't ship a terminal emulator that emulates only half the features Vim needs. You can't incrementally improve a terminal emulator below a certain threshold of functionality. I wanted to ensure that the first public release met that threshold. I wanted people to be able to use it productively and professionally right away.

On these two fronts, the private beta was a massive success (far beyond my expectations). I was able to manage my bandwidth and focus on my family. For the first year of my daughter's life, I woke her up every morning, I played with her every wake window, I went to every doctor's appointment, I was there for every milestone¹.

And the beta community was amazing. They were patient, they were understanding, they were helpful. They found bugs, they provided feedback, and they made Ghostty so much better than it would have been without them. I can't thank them enough.

The Private Beta: The Bad

Everything else was an unintended consequence of the private beta. The hype, the frustration from those who couldn't get in, the elitisim perceived by some, etc.

I didn't anticipate the hype. Some people think I am lying when I say this. I'm not. I'm not so naive to think that private betas and exclusive access don't generate hype in principle. But I didn't think many people at all would be interested in a terminal emulator. I thought I was building boring software for a niche audience. No hype!

But I was wrong, and the consequences were real. People were frustrated that they couldn't get in. People felt left out. People felt like I was being fake to generate hype. The waitlist grew larger than I was comfortable allowing in (given my prior stated priorities).

I'm sorry about that. All I can say is that I didn't intend for this to happen. I ramped up beta invites to try to get as many people in as I felt comfortable with (well, a bit beyond that). We ended the beta at around 5,000 users in a Discord of 28,000 at the time. Not quite the percentage of access I wanted for people but more than I could handle.

The good news is Ghostty is now public and everyone can use it! I hope we can put the negative aspects of the private beta behind us and focus on the future.

The Tech Stack

Ghostty has an unconventional tech stack and architecture: Zig for the core and platform-specific code for the GUIs. More details on the tech stack can be found in the original talk I gave on Ghostty.

Two years later, I'm extremely happy with the tech stack and architecture. I think it was the right choice for the project but more than that, I think this architecture could be the right choice for many projects².

Zig has been an absolute joy to work with. I have fun writing Zig every single day and that fun hasn't diminished a bit over two years. The build system is fantastic, the community is amazing, and the core maintainers are brilliant. My excitement is well known and I've also put my money where my mouth is by sponsoring the Zig Software Foundation.

The split between shared core written in Zig and platform-specific GUIs has also been a success. I've been able to effortless integrate platform-native experiences into Ghostty while keeping over 90% of the code shared.

The beta community has also had no problem contributing to the project. I think this shows that despite being a new, niche language, Zig is easily approachable and productive for new contributors. This is great news for the future of the project.

An Unlikely Community

The community that formed around Ghostty was unexpected and amazing.

To be specific, I'm talking about the private beta community. The public community is a bit of a wild west due to the unstructured nature of not having access to the software. But the private community has focus and purpose and it has been a joy to be a part of.

The Ghostty community is a group of people who are passionate about terminals (of course!) but also about performance, design, software quality, doing things right and for the right reasons. It's a group of people that are pleasant to be around and collaborate with. It's a group of people that I've really enjoyed getting to know and I'm excited to continue to work with.

For me personally, it's also unlikely because most people in the Ghostty community are also new to my work. Most don't have a background in infrastructure and therefore aren't familiar with my previous work. It has been fun to build a new community and it reminds me a lot of the early days of my career when I was building a community around my first open source project.

A Post-1.0 Future

Ghostty 1.0 is out but the project is far from done for me. Even the 1.0 is less complete than I would have liked! But I had to draw a line in the sand somewhere and I think the 1.0 turned out great.

For the short term, I want to continue focusing on the "best existing terminal" goal. I want to shore up the features that didn't make it into 1.0 and fix the bugs that are still present. I want to make sure that the foundation that Ghostty is built on is solid for future innovation.

In the medium but not too long term (within 2025), I want to shift focus to release a stable and standalone libghostty that can be used by other projects to build their own terminal emulator frontends. I think libghostty is the most promising part of the project for the long term impact Ghostty can have within the tech community.

But, regardless of goals, Ghostty will always first and foremost be a passion project for me. I work on this project because it's fun and I want to make sure the community and I don't lose sight of that.

Thanks

I believe nothing in this world is accomplished alone. I may have started Ghostty alone but I didn't finish it alone and I have so many people to show appreciation for along the way.

The impact of the Ghostty beta community cannot be overstated. I said this already in this post but Ghostty is only as feature rich and polished as it is thanks to the attention to detail and feedback of the beta community. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who participated in the beta and helped make Ghostty what it is today.

The Discord mods deserve a special shoutout. They worked hard to keep the peace and keep the community focused on the right things. I could see their effort daily in trying to create an environment that allowed me to focus and the beta community to thrive. We have less than 10 mods for 30,000 people and they did an amazing job given the circumstances³.

And finally, and most importantly, I want to thank my wife. We're first time parents and juggling a new baby with a side project I wanted to find time to work on was no small feat (even with the private beta aspect). She helped me find the time to work on Ghostty and she patiently listened (fell asleep) to my ramblings about font rendering.

I hope you enjoy Ghostty 1.0 and feel the love and care that went into it. I'm excited to see where we go from here!

Footnotes

1. I had to leave for a couple weeks over the first year so I did miss some days, but I was as present as I could be. ↩

2. I'm not saying I invented it! But it isn't something I see often. ↩

3. I will acknowledge that the mods and I wielded the ban hammer liberally. I'm sure we kicked out some good people. But given the size of the Discord we had very little patience for people who acted out. ↩