Tools/ghostty-org/ghostling

ghostling

A minimum viable terminal emulator built on top of the libghostty C API. Ex minimo, infinita nascuntur. ๐Ÿ‘ป๐Ÿฃ

1.1k โ˜…+7/wkemergingCMIT License โ†’new this week

The Lens

By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.

Updated Mar 2026

Ghostling is the reference implementation showing how to do it with libghostty. It's a minimum viable terminal emulator in a single C file, using Raylib for windowing and rendering.

This isn't a terminal you'd use daily. It's a teaching tool and proof-of-concept for libghostty-vt, the zero-dependency library (not even libc) that handles VT sequence parsing, terminal state management, cursor positioning, text reflow, scrollback, and everything else a terminal needs under the hood. The same library that powers Ghostty, one of the best terminal emulators available.

MIT licensed. From the Ghostty organization.

The catch: this is a demo, not a product. If you want a terminal emulator, use Ghostty itself. Ghostling exists to show developers how to use libghostty; it's useful if you're building something that needs terminal functionality embedded in it, and pretty much useless otherwise.

Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid

fully free

Free Tier

Fully free under MIT. Reference terminal emulator built on libghostty.

Self-Hosted

Build from source using Zig. Minimal dependencies.

Paid

None.

Free. It's a reference implementation and teaching tool.

Self-hosting ops:trivial

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Score
59/100 ยท C+
Adoption12/30
Maintenance15/25
Community7/20
License15/15
Analysis10/10

A low score is not a verdict on quality. Young and niche tools start low by design. How we calculate scores

Trust Signals

Permissive license (MIT)

License: MIT License

Use freely, including commercial. Just keep the license.

Commercial use: โœ“ Yes

About

Owner
Ghostty (Organization)
Backed by
Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp founder)
Stars
1,088
Forks
47

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