Tools/ghostty-org/ghostty

ghostty

👻 Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

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The Lens

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

Updated Sep 2026

Ghostty is a fast, native terminal emulator with GPU acceleration. macOS gets SwiftUI and Metal rendering; Linux gets GTK with optional systemd integration. It nails standards compliance (Kitty graphics, image protocols, synchronized rendering) while keeping legacy xterm sequences working.

Free, MIT-licensed, no setup beyond installing. Multi-window, tabs, splits with customization, and a multi-threaded architecture (one read, write, and render thread per terminal). Performance is in Alacritty territory, around 100x faster than the old defaults, but with a real native UI instead of a bare config file.

This is the right pick if you've used Alacritty and missed the polish, or used iTerm2 and missed the speed. Solo: free and worth installing. Small teams: free. Large teams: free.

The catch: no Windows yet, and the project deliberately has not added Ghostty-specific terminal sequences. If you want a wild new feature, you wait. If you want a terminal that just works, you don't.

Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid

fully free

Free tier: Everything. MIT-licensed standalone app and embeddable libghostty library.

Self-hosted: Not applicable; it's a desktop app.

Paid: No paid version exists or is planned.

Completely free and open source. Always.

What to do by team size

Solo: free
Small team: free
Medium team: free
Large team: free

Self-hosting ops:trivial

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Score

95/100 · A+

Adoption30/30

Maintenance25/25

Community15/20

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

High adoption: 51,534 starsActive community: 2,419 forksCommunity discussions enabledOrganization account (6 public repos)Notable author: 6,859 followersBacked by: Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp founder)Author also built: ghostty-org/ghostling (961 stars)

License: MIT License

Use freely, including commercial. Just keep the license.

Commercial use: ✓ Yes

About

Owner: Ghostty (Organization)
Backed by: Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp founder)
Stars: 62,995
Forks: 3,782

Also by Ghostty

ghostty-org/ghostling961 ★

A minimum viable terminal emulator built on top of the libghostty C API. Ex minimo, infinita nascunt

ghostty-org/website295 ★

Ghostty website. For the source to the Ghostty project, please see https://github.com/ghostty-org/gh

ghostty-org/.github239 ★

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