libghostty-based terminals on Windows

[pluiedev]

Since the Ghostty team does not plan to make an official Windows build anymore, we have closed #2563 and decided to leave it up to our community to create libghostty-based Windows terminals that better suit their needs. Feel free to share them here!

Disclaimer: The projects linked here are not official Ghostty projects, and we have not vetted them for quality or safety considerations. "Ghostty" is trademarked by the Ghostty nonprofit and must not appear in the name or branding of third-party projects—if you find projects in the wild that misuse our trademark, please advise them to change their branding accordingly. Thanks!

[ethancodavo]

Thanks for extracting this thread and letting it continue! The previous discussion inspired me to put together my own little Ghostty Windows version specifically for connecting to WSL:
https://github.com/Codavo/ghostinthewsl

Hopefully it's helpful to others as well!

[sebastianstudniczek]

Out of curiosity, how much effort it required to bypass ConPTY? I was not aware of it until recently, definitely will give it a try to potentially solve performance issues/glitches with neovim + tmux setup

[ethancodavo]

It depends on how you do it. The simplest is probably to ssh to the WSL guest, though that relies on standard host to guest networking and running an ssh server on the guest which the user may or may not want for security reasons, etc. What I did instead was create a little portable bridge binary which uses Hyper-V/VSOCK to communicate. I think that's cleaner, but it's more complicated.

[ethancodavo]

Oh, I did also end up embedding a newer ConPTY for use not with WSL. That's not a bypass since you can't really bypass it entirely for the Windows side AFAIK, but at least then you're not exposed to random older buggy system versions of ConPTY.

[sudo-tee]

The way I did it in my project was simply to open wsl.exe as a normal executable and spawn a simple binary to stream pty bytes directly with a framed protocol over OSC.

It works really well and speed things up a lot while also supporting all escape sequences.

https://github.com/sudo-tee/hollow/blob/main/src/wsl_bypass.zig

Nothing fancy, I wrote this in about a day with the help of LLM's.

[ethancodavo]

Yeah, using one wsl.exe process per tab and just using pipes as the relay is probably the better approach for most use cases honestly and it's definitely easier. I was a bit worried about scaling/performance overhead of going that route, but it looks like it's fairly minimal and for most cases you're PTY bottlenecked anyway.

[marler8997]

Here's my flavor, uses Direct3d11/DirectWrite to make a small (less than 2 MB when compiled with ReleaseSmall) exe with libghostty: https://github.com/marler8997/mite

I also opted for slight transparency, I like being able to get an idea of what's behind it:

[missdeer]

How to build from source? Or any prebuilt binaries?

[marler8997]

To build you just run "zig build".

If you're feeling adventurous you can also try my new cli tool that builds/installs software from source that uses the zig build system:

Install hew

powershell -c "irm https://gethew.github.io/ps1 | iex"

Build/Install mite

hew install github:marler8997/mite

[missdeer]

@marler8997 Thanks for your reply. The binaries is ready now, then how to configure it, such as font-family etc. ?

[missdeer]

Forked mite. Add tab bar, customizable font family/font size, font fallback chain, customizable launch programs:)
https://github.com/missdeer/mite

[Crypto-Spartan]

has anyone used https://github.com/amanthanvi/winghostty?

[Crypto-Spartan]

I just happened to stumble upon winghostty when looking for a ghostty windows build. It's not my place to tell the maintainer to find a different name given that I'm not associated with either project.

[nanasess]

Following up on the trademark note in this thread: the project has been rebranded. winghostty is now noctty — https://github.com/amanthanvi/noctty

The request reached the maintainer separately: the Ghostty team opened amanthanvi/noctty#119 on 2026-08-18, and the rebrand landed two days later in amanthanvi/noctty#148, so neither the name nor the icon uses the mark any more.

To answer the original question: yes — I use it daily on Windows against WSL and contribute to it. It's at over 350 stars now and is actively maintained. (I'm a contributor, not the maintainer.)

[sebastianstudniczek]

Does it use conpty or have some mechanism to connect directly to linux pty?

[nanasess]

ConPTY — there is no direct-to-Linux-pty path in it. It calls CreatePseudoConsole / ClosePseudoConsole either way; what changes is which implementation backs them.

Releases ship the Microsoft.Windows.Console.ConPTY redistributable (pinned at 1.24.260710001) next to the exe and load that in preference to the in-box conhost. That matters more than it sounds, because it moves you across the v1/v2 boundary from microsoft/terminal#17510: v1 parses the child's VT into a conhost text buffer and re-renders a snapshot to the pipe, so sequences it does not model get dropped or reordered; v2 parses for console state but separately writes the original VT bytes through.

A/B on my machine, same binary, only the ConPTY implementation differing:

	in-box (v1)	bundled (v2)
plain scroll, 50k lines	0.065s	0.023s
Unicode-heavy, 10k lines	0.176s	0.123s
kitty graphics	does not get through	works
Primary DA	conhost answers (?61;...)	the terminal answers (?62;22;52c)

noctty +version reports which one is active, so you can tell whether you are actually on the redistributable. One caveat: it only covers consoles noctty itself hosts — a nested console, such as launching cmd.exe from inside a WSL shell, still goes to System32's in-box conhost. There is a write-up of the generation differences in docs/windows-vt-conformance.md if you want the details.

So this is the same approach @ethancodavo described upthread for the non-WSL side, without the vsock bridge. If it is the bypass you are after rather than a better ConPTY, GhostInTheWSL and hollow are the ones to look at.

[sebastianstudniczek]

Yeah, asking due to this exact reason, currently using tmux/wsl setup so it's nice to have the possibilty eliminate additional translation layer

[sudo-tee]

I am working on a windows/WSL first app with ghostty-vt on windows.

This is a pretty young repo but I am using it daily and it's really fast and more powerful than it looks.

https://github.com/sudo-tee/hollow

It's different approach than the original ghostty as it has full support for luajit as a configuration/plugin layer. The UI is mostly keyboard driven so no UI framework. Other than a small Lua layer on top of Sokol to support a variety of widgets that can be extended. Or created by the user. It can also be driven by the CLI or by OSC for remote session.

It supports workspaces, tabs and splits. So it can replace tmux.

It also treats WSL as a first class shell, since it's my main environment for work (not by choice). But every windows terminal had sub par WSL integration.

See it as Ghostty, wezterm and neovim had a child.

I post it here if people want to use it fork it or contribute.

I don't know where this experiment will end up. This is solo side project so don't expect a perfect terminal. But I'm willing to improve things along the way

[sebastianstudniczek]

Thanks for sharing. Out of curiosity what do you miss from existing solutions (windows terminal, wezterm, alacritty) that made you decide to write ghostty based one (given mainly WSL usage)?

[sudo-tee]

For wezterm it was almost perfect. But having a couple of bugs and development is at a very slow pace so some of the issues I had were open ticket with no activity for more than a year. Also wezterm had performance issue when scrolling on neovim.

Alacrity was fast but was missing all the scripting ability so I was relying on tmux . Alacrity also does not have the best font rendering and no ligatures

Nothing really deal breaker. But I wanted the challenge of combining speed, extensive scriptability and good font rendering in a cohesive package. Almost a way of reproducing my dotfiles in one unified application.

[sebastianstudniczek]

Yeah, actually due to performance issues with WSL/Neovim I am currently using Windows Terminal (with Tmux) instead of Wezterm.

It's good but I don't like the fact that I can't easily synchronize config between machines and put it it in dotfiles since it's thightly coupled with UI

[sebastianstudniczek]

Btw, kinda offtop but regarding performance, did you experience maybe input lag, cursor lag, especially visible when scrolling when using neovim + tmux inside wsl (using wezterm/alacritty or windows terminal)? It's happening for me after some time

[sudo-tee]

Yes I did, tmux is great but it it slows down, this is why I liked wezterm so much, even if it's slower than alacritty the feel was better since there was no double multiplexing happening.

[deblasis]

Hi there everyone!

I had promised last April 22nd to come here and provide an update about what I have been working on, I have been slowed down by some personal/family related stuff but I am very close to the official launch of Wintty.
I am single digit days away from v1.
I might cut a few release candidates test some more the updates with real users.

I am not posting screenshots / videos on purpose... I want you to be curious and try it for yourself!
I will post something at launch. Probably edit this comment as well.

EDITED 2026-09-22: Ok, fine, short demo of the persistent sessions and launch speed on a machine that is currently exhaling its last CPU cycles. Opening task manager for comparison. Also, this is a un-optimized build so things will improve a lot.

WinttyProPinnedMachineTaskMgrComparisonSmall.mp4

EDITED 2026-10-27 Added some more dynamism with the animation framework I am building on the side of the side of the side.

A TON of more work under the hood.

Next featureset past the upcoming release is all about control.
Control of your devices mostly.
But also tokens and attention....

Wintty-liquid-1-1080.mp4

What is Wintty?

It's a windows UI for the awesome libghostty. That's it. If you read further you ignored the warning signs at your peril!

The idea is for it to have feature parity with the MacOS version but all revisited for the Windows user, with native feel and all that jazz.
I have been a Windows user since 3.11 and yes, I used Vista as well 😄 so I should have some muscle memory in that department.

But why? .gif

I started the project as a private R&D effort to figure out how to build a very nice terminal for Windows based on Ghostty.

Additional motivations, borderline off-topic

Also to get exposure to Zig... And... I realize that I have been shipping quite a lot of stuff in Zig since I started. The most ambitious projects are still private but I will make them public soon. A happy accident is also https://github.com/zioshade/zioshade started as a way to get rid of C++ dependencies for shaders in Ghostty. It has become its own thing that I am also using in Wintty the app and the website here agents and benchmarks say that's better than what is meant to replace, I will let your eyeballs settle that argument, zero stars BTW, you could be first 🤣).
I even forked Zig and added some features that are helping me a lot (centralized caching with automatic LRU GC, very useful on constrained machines with low storage and lots of worktrees, wasm as a first class citizen, coding coach inspired by the best and worst Zig repos and... a blasphemic borrowchecker that should work with incremental as well! 🙈 It is already a self-hosted thing and capable of catching real bugs that affected major repos like bun, tigerbeetle, ghostty and wintty of course LOL) but since I used AI quite intensively, out of shame I think I might just keep that stuff in my toy/toolbox for now... But if/when AK changes his mind about AI I will feel more entitled to stAIn his language with some functionally drunk "slop" or codified english spoken with an accent.

I started by upstreaming quite a few low-level PRs but when it came to bringing the meaty stuff (renderer, app shell, etc). I realized -no, Mitchell pushed back and rightfully toned down my enthusiasm- that it was too early to PR upstream, especially because the Ghostty team was not ready to support that alien C# code.
I would obviously support it myself and the best way to prove it's possible is to just do it! That's how Wintty was born.

Another reason is that I didn't want to infringe any trademark while still giving full credits to @mitchellh and team for the goodies that made this possible.

> Official launch? But it's MIT licensed!

Correct, the code in https://github.com/deblasis/wintty is all there, you can take it, build it yourself, fork it, enjoy.
Feedback of any kind is more than welcome even if you just build it yourself.

What I mean with "launch" is the ability to download signed binaries (with a proper certificate, not a self signed one) and get automatic updates if you support the project with any amount of dollars, the minimum is 1$ one off, and with all the feedback you can, every little helps.

I had to build the infra to gate the downloads with Github auth, build and release the various flavours (release, debug-fast, debug-slow), set up gated Discord, and also the various Editions...

Oh and we'll have ARM64 binaries too soon. I don't have the hardware to test it personally -yet- but perhaps some of you could be my lab rats! [evil laughter]

As you can imagine, all this infra costs money and my kids are starting to exploit our "unlimited budget on books policy" so we are in trouble, that's why I am gating things behind sponsorship.

It's also a way to gauge if it's worth it to keep working on it publicly.
I already got a few brave legendary sponsors (thank you! You are awesome ❤️ ). And it happened before I said anything about this project. Probably only now search engines are starting to scrape the website.

> Editions?

The most generous ones will also have access to a Pro tier that has features that probably won't ever make it to the OSS version, hence they are closed source for now; built, packaged and signed using a fairly sophisticated build system in a separate private repo.
"Experiments" I would call them but they can become nice things given enough love and dedication and feedback...
Stuff like legacy DX11 support (boring), streamer mode (umm), narration (ohh), multiplexer (Whatta...), etc.

I am finishing up the last bits to make sure I can support it properly and at the same time I am giving it a final polish but you all can check it out already and reach out in whichever way you prefer to tell me what you think!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER (:

[Lugia123]

Polter (https://github.com/Lugia123/polter) is a fork I use to run several AI coding agents side by side. It has a Windows build.

What it is on Windows:

• The core is used as-is: same VT, same renderer, over OpenGL. The Windows part is a Rust host that does the window, tabs, splits, IME, menus and settings. ConPTY underneath.
• Tabs, splits, a settings window, saved projects (tabs, directories and scrollback come back), and a screenshot tool.
• The reason the fork exists: one agent session can watch the agents in your other tabs and see which is stuck on a prompt and which has finished, with a group chat and a task panel between them, exposed as MCP tools. If you don't run agents it is just a terminal, and none of that is in your way.

Honest edges:

• Needs OpenGL 4.3. On a VM with only a basic display adapter it will not start; there is an issue open for it.
• Unsigned, so SmartScreen will ask.
• The agent side is only tested in depth with Claude Code.
• Written with heavy AI assistance (Claude Code), which the repo says up front.

x64 zip under Releases, unzip and run. Not affiliated with the Ghostty project; bug reports go to my repo, not here.

[murr2k]

murrtty (https://murrtty.org, https://github.com/murr2k/murrtty) is a fork of Ghostty with a Win32 application runtime: Ghostty's core, with the window, tabs, splits, header bar, dialogs, IME and clipboard written against Win32, and Ghostty's OpenGL renderer running on WGL.

• Aims at parity with Ghostty's GTK app: splits, tabs, the quick terminal, the command palette, global keybinds, the terminal inspector, notifications, progress bars, transparency and blur.
• Reads Ghostty's config format, and a file it reads still loads in Ghostty 1.4. It adds a config editor, session restore, and shell integration for PowerShell and cmd.
• Upstream releases are merged in (currently Ghostty 1.4.0).
• Renders with OpenGL 4.3 for now; there's no Direct3D renderer.

0.1.0 is an unsigned preview. Building from source is the recommended route: one script, and it fetches Zig itself. MIT license. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the Ghostty project.