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Developing Ghostty

This document describes the technical details behind Ghostty's development. If you'd like to open any pull requests or would like to implement new features into Ghostty, please make sure to read our "Contributing to Ghostty" document first.

To start development on Ghostty, you need to build Ghostty from a Git checkout, which is very similar in process to building Ghostty from a source tarball. One key difference is that obviously you need to clone the Git repository instead of unpacking the source tarball:

git clone https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty
cd ghostty

[!NOTE]

Ghostty may require extra dependencies when building from a Git checkout compared to a source tarball. Tip versions may also require a different version of Zig or other toolchains (e.g. the Xcode SDK on macOS) compared to stable versions — make sure to follow the steps closely!

When you're developing Ghostty, it's very likely that you will want to build a debug build to diagnose issues more easily. This is already the default for Zig builds, so simply run zig build without any -Doptimize flags.

There are many more build steps than just zig build, some of which are listed here:

Command Description
zig build run Runs Ghostty
zig build run-valgrind Runs Ghostty under Valgrind to check for memory leaks
zig build test Runs unit tests (accepts -Dtest-filter=<filter> to only run tests whose name matches the filter)
zig build update-translations Updates Ghostty's translation strings (see the Contributor's Guide on Localizing Ghostty)
zig build dist Builds a source tarball
zig build distcheck Builds and validates a source tarball

Extra Dependencies

Building Ghostty from a Git checkout on Linux requires some additional dependencies:

  • blueprint-compiler (version 0.16.0 or newer)

macOS users don't require any additional dependencies.

Xcode Version and SDKs

Building the Ghostty macOS app requires that Xcode, the macOS SDK, and the iOS SDK are all installed.

A common issue is that the incorrect version of Xcode is either installed or selected. Use the xcode-select command to ensure that the correct version of Xcode is selected:

sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode-beta.app

[!IMPORTANT]

Main branch development of Ghostty is preparing for the next major macOS release, Tahoe (macOS 26). Therefore, the main branch requires Xcode 26 and the macOS 26 SDK.

You do not need to be running on macOS 26 to build Ghostty, you can still use Xcode 26 beta on macOS 15 stable.

AI and Agents

If you're using AI assistance with Ghostty, Ghostty provides an AGENTS.md file read by most of the popular AI agents to help produce higher quality results.

We also provide commands in .agents/commands that have some vetted prompts for common tasks that have been shown to produce good results. We provide these to help reduce the amount of time a contributor has to spend prompting the AI to get good results, and hopefully to lower the slop produced.

  • /gh-issue <number/url> - Produces a prompt for diagnosing a GitHub issue, explaining the problem, and suggesting a plan for resolving it. Requires gh to be installed with read-only access to Ghostty.

[!WARNING]

All AI assistance usage must be disclosed and we expect contributors to understand the code that is produced and be able to answer questions about it. If you don't understand the code produced, feel free to disclose that, but if it has problems, we may ask you to fix it and close the issue. It isn't a maintainers job to review a PR so broken that it requires significant rework to be acceptable.

Linting

Prettier

Ghostty's docs and resources (not including Zig code) are linted using Prettier with out-of-the-box settings. A Prettier CI check will fail builds with improper formatting. Therefore, if you are modifying anything Prettier will lint, you may want to install it locally and run this from the repo root before you commit:

prettier --write .

Make sure your Prettier version matches the version of Prettier in devShell.nix.

Nix users can use the following command to format with Prettier:

nix develop -c prettier --write .

Alejandra

Nix modules are formatted with Alejandra. An Alejandra CI check will fail builds with improper formatting.

Nix users can use the following command to format with Alejandra:

nix develop -c alejandra .

Non-Nix users should install Alejandra and use the following command to format with Alejandra:

alejandra .

Make sure your Alejandra version matches the version of Alejandra in devShell.nix.

Updating the Zig Cache Fixed-Output Derivation Hash

The Nix package depends on a fixed-output derivation that manages the Zig package cache. This allows the package to be built in the Nix sandbox.

Occasionally (usually when build.zig.zon is updated), the hash that identifies the cache will need to be updated. There are jobs that monitor the hash in CI, and builds will fail if it drifts.

To update it, you can run the following in the repository root:

./nix/build-support/check-zig-cache.sh --update

This will write out the nix/zigCacheHash.nix file with the updated hash that can then be committed and pushed to fix the builds.

Including and Updating Translations

See the Contributor's Guide for more details.

Checking for Memory Leaks

While Zig does an amazing job of finding and preventing memory leaks, Ghostty uses many third-party libraries that are written in C. Improper usage of those libraries or bugs in those libraries can cause memory leaks that Zig cannot detect by itself.

On Linux

On Linux the recommended tool to check for memory leaks is Valgrind. The recommended way to run Valgrind is via zig build:

zig build run-valgrind

This builds a Ghostty executable with Valgrind support and runs Valgrind with the proper flags to ensure we're suppressing known false positives.

You can combine the same build args with run-valgrind that you can with run, such as specifying additional configurations after a trailing --.

Input Stack Testing

The input stack is the part of the codebase that starts with a key event and ends with text encoding being sent to the pty (it does not include rendering the text, which is part of the font or rendering stack).

If you modify any part of the input stack, you must manually verify all the following input cases work properly. We unfortunately do not automate this in any way, but if we can do that one day that'd save a LOT of grief and time.

Note: this list may not be exhaustive, I'm still working on it.

Linux IME

IME (Input Method Editors) are a common source of bugs in the input stack, especially on Linux since there are multiple different IME systems interacting with different windowing systems and application frameworks all written by different organizations.

The following matrix should be tested to ensure that all IME input works properly:

  1. Wayland, X11
  2. ibus, fcitx, none
  3. Dead key input (e.g. Spanish), CJK (e.g. Japanese), Emoji, Unicode Hex
  4. ibus versions: 1.5.29, 1.5.30, 1.5.31 (each exhibit slightly different behaviors)

[!NOTE]

This is a work in progress. I'm still working on this list and it is not complete. As I find more test cases, I will add them here.

Dead Key Input

Set your keyboard layout to "Spanish" (or another layout that uses dead keys).

  1. Launch Ghostty
  2. Press '
  3. Press a
  4. Verify that á is displayed

Note that the dead key may or may not show a preedit state visually. For ibus and fcitx it does but for the "none" case it does not. Importantly, the text should be correct when it is sent to the pty.

We should also test canceling dead key input:

  1. Launch Ghostty
  2. Press '
  3. Press escape
  4. Press a
  5. Verify that a is displayed (no diacritic)

CJK Input

Configure fcitx or ibus with a keyboard layout like Japanese or Mozc. The exact layout doesn't matter.

  1. Launch Ghostty
  2. Press Ctrl+Shift to switch to "Hiragana"
  3. On a US physical layout, type: konn, you should see こん in preedit.
  4. Press Enter
  5. Verify that こん is displayed in the terminal.

We should also test switching input methods while preedit is active, which should commit the text:

  1. Launch Ghostty
  2. Press Ctrl+Shift to switch to "Hiragana"
  3. On a US physical layout, type: konn, you should see こん in preedit.
  4. Press Ctrl+Shift to switch to another layout (any)
  5. Verify that こん is displayed in the terminal as committed text.

Nix Virtual Machines

Several Nix virtual machine definitions are provided by the project for testing and developing Ghostty against multiple different Linux desktop environments.

Running these requires a working Nix installation, either Nix on your favorite Linux distribution, NixOS, or macOS with nix-darwin installed. Further requirements for macOS are detailed below.

VMs should only be run on your local desktop and then powered off when not in use, which will discard any changes to the VM.

The VM definitions provide minimal software "out of the box" but additional software can be installed by using standard Nix mechanisms like nix run nixpkgs#<package>.

Linux

  1. Check out the Ghostty source and change to the directory.
  2. Run nix run .#<vmtype>. <vmtype> can be any of the VMs defined in the nix/vm directory (without the .nix suffix) excluding any file prefixed with common or create.
  3. The VM will build and then launch. Depending on the speed of your system, this can take a while, but eventually you should get a new VM window.
  4. The Ghostty source directory should be mounted to /tmp/shared in the VM. Depending on what UID and GID of the user that you launched the VM as, /tmp/shared may be writable by the VM user, so be careful!

macOS

  1. To run the VMs on macOS you will need to enable the Linux builder in your nix-darwin config. This should be as simple as adding nix.linux-builder.enable=true to your configuration and then rebuilding. See this blog post for more information about the Linux builder and how to tune the performance.
  2. Once the Linux builder has been enabled, you should be able to follow the Linux instructions above to launch a VM.

Custom VMs

To easily create a custom VM without modifying the Ghostty source, create a new directory, then create a file called flake.nix with the following text in the new directory.

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable";
    ghostty.url = "github:ghostty-org/ghostty";
  };
  outputs = {
    nixpkgs,
    ghostty,
    ...
  }: {
   nixosConfigurations.custom-vm = ghostty.create-gnome-vm {
     nixpkgs = nixpkgs;
     system = "x86_64-linux";
     overlay = ghostty.overlays.releasefast;
     # module = ./configuration.nix # also works
     module = {pkgs, ...}: {
       environment.systemPackages = [
         pkgs.btop
       ];
     };
    };
  };
}

The custom VM can then be run with a command like this:

nix run .#nixosConfigurations.custom-vm.config.system.build.vm

A file named ghostty.qcow2 will be created that is used to persist any changes made in the VM. To "reset" the VM to default delete the file and it will be recreated the next time you run the VM.

Contributing new VM definitions

VM Acceptance Criteria

We welcome the contribution of new VM definitions, as long as they meet the following criteria:

  1. They should be different enough from existing VM definitions that they represent a distinct user (and developer) experience.
  2. There's a significant Ghostty user population that uses a similar environment.
  3. The VMs can be built using only packages from the current stable NixOS release.

VM Definition Criteria

  1. VMs should be as minimal as possible so that they build and launch quickly. Additional software can be added at runtime with a command like nix run nixpkgs#<package name>.
  2. VMs should not expose any services to the network, or run any remote access software like SSH daemons, VNC or RDP.
  3. VMs should auto-login using the "ghostty" user.