Ghostty

Terminal emulators tend to make you pick two of speed, features and a native interface. Ghostty is built on the claim that all three fit in one program, and it is stable enough to be in daily use by millions of people and machines.

Underneath the GUI sits libghostty, a cross-platform C and Zig library with no dependencies of its own. Anyone can use it to build an emulator or to embed terminal behavior, style parsing included, into another application, with a minimal reference project and smaller examples published alongside.

The roadmap the project set for itself is nearly finished.

• Standards compliance: every regularly used control sequence works, checked against an xterm audit.
• Modern sequences: Kitty graphics and image protocols, clipboard sequences, synchronized rendering and theme notifications.
• Competitive performance: within a few percent of Alacritty and far ahead of legacy terminals.
• Windowing: multiple windows, tabs and panes instead of leaning on a multiplexer.
• Native experiences: platform-specific interfaces rather than one generic shell everywhere.

Ghostty-only control sequences are the single roadmap item still unbuilt. Behavior is decided by written standards first, xterm second and other popular terminals third, which is how the project defines what counts as standard, and downloads plus documentation live on its website.