GoKawiilGhostling - Minimal libghostty Terminal
Ghostling is a demo project meant to highlight a minimum functional terminal built on the libghostty C API in a single C file.
The example uses Raylib for windowing and rendering. It is single-threaded (although libghostty-vt supports threading) and uses a 2D graphics renderer instead of a direct GPU renderer like the primary Ghostty GUI. This is to showcase the flexibility of libghostty and how it can be used in a variety of contexts.
Warning The Ghostling terminal isn't meant to be a full featured, daily use terminal. It is a minimal viable terminal based on libghostty. Also, since this is basically a demo, I didn't carefully audit every single place for correctness, and this is C, so you've been warned!
What is Libghostty?
Libghostty is an embeddable library extracted from Ghostty's core, exposing a C and Zig API so any application can embed correct, fast terminal emulation.
Ghostling uses libghostty-vt, a zero-dependency library (not even libc) that handles VT sequence parsing, terminal state management (cursor position, styles, text reflow, scrollback, etc.), and renderer state management. It contains no renderer drawing or windowing code; the consumer (Ghostling, in this case) provides its own. The core logic is extracted directly from Ghostty and inherits all of its real-world benefits: excellent, accurate, and complete terminal emulation support, SIMD-optimized parsing, leading Unicode support, highly optimized memory usage, and a robust fuzzed and tested codebase, all proven by millions of daily active users of Ghostty GUI.
Features
Despite being a minimal, thin layer above libghostty, look at all the features you do get:
Resize with text reflow
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