v0.1.0 — first downloadable build

Windows Terminal, with ghostty's engine behind the pane instead of the stock one — chosen per profile, in the same window, side by side with cascadia panes.

This is the first downloadable build. It is a working fork, not a finished product; read Known issues before installing.

Install

Full instructions, including what trusting the certificate actually grants: docs/install.md.

The short version — trust the certificate from an elevated PowerShell:

Import-Certificate -FilePath .\winterm-ghostty-0.1.0.0.cer -CertStoreLocation Cert:\LocalMachine\TrustedPeople

then install (elevation not needed):

Add-AppxPackage -Path .\winterm-ghostty-0.1.0.0-x64.msix

If that fails with 0x80073CF3, the Microsoft.UI.Xaml.2.8 framework is missing. It is deliberately not shipped here — anyone installing this almost certainly has Windows Terminal already, which depends on the same framework, and Windows 11 preinstalls it. winget install --id Microsoft.UI.Xaml.2.8 fixes it.

Launch Terminal (ghostty) from the Start menu, or wtg.exe.

Nothing switches engine by itself. Add "engine": "ghostty" to a profile — or to profiles.defaults — to opt in:

{
    "name": "Ubuntu",
    "engine": "ghostty"     // "cascadia" (default) or "ghostty"
}

To confirm a pane is really using it, open the search box (Ctrl+Shift+F): on a ghostty pane the regex and case toggles are greyed out.

What works

Rendering, keyboard input (including IME), mouse, selection and clipboard, search, scrollback and marks, all six cursor shapes, Kitty graphics, and the terminal-size reports that image clients rely on. A pane drains its pty at roughly three quarters of cascadia's rate.

Everything above the pane — tabs, panes, settings, command palette, search box — is unaware of which engine it is holding.

Known issues

• No accessibility. There is no UIA text provider on a ghostty pane, so Narrator and NVDA cannot read one. If you rely on a screen reader, keep those profiles on "engine": "cascadia".
• x64 only. Zig 0.16.0 cannot target aarch64-windows-msvc at all, so there is no ARM64 build to ship.
• KD-06 — with a ligating font, parking a block cursor on the first character of a ligature such as -- makes the second half blink along with the cursor. Workaround: a font without that ligature, e.g. Consolas.
• KD-04 — a pane in a background window keeps drawing a focused-looking blinking cursor, and keeps presenting frames to do it.
• KD-05 — the Windows cursor-blink settings are ignored, including turning blinking off.
• Shares upstream's COM class IDs. If you also have Windows Terminal Dev installed, both register the same CLSIDs and the last one to register wins, so "Open in Terminal" and default-terminal handoff may resolve to either. Stable and Preview are unaffected.

Each defect in docs/known-defects.md records what was measured rather than what was assumed, and what would tell the remaining hypotheses apart.

Signing

Signed with a self-signed certificate (CN=Darren Shepherd) — there is no paid publisher identity behind this, so Windows has no reason to trust it until you say so. docs/install.md explains what that grants and how to undo it. If you would rather not, the patch series in ghostty-patches/ and terminal-patches/ exists so you can build it yourself.

Verify what you downloaded against SHA256SUMS.txt.

Provenance

An unofficial fork of microsoft/terminal and ghostty-org/ghostty, not affiliated with or endorsed by either. Both are MIT; so is this.

Built locally rather than in CI — there is no build log behind this artifact beyond the patch series it was built from.