v0.2.1

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.

It is a working fork, not a finished product; read Known issues before installing.

Install

No installer — unzip and run. Full notes: docs/install.md.

Expand-Archive .\winterm-ghostty-0.2.1.0-x64-portable.zip -DestinationPath .
.\terminal-0.2.1.0\WindowsTerminal.exe

No certificate to trust, no admin rights, no Developer Mode, nothing registered. Settings live beside the exe, so deleting the folder removes every trace.

What you give up is integration: no Start menu entry, no wtg.exe on PATH, no "Open in Terminal", and it cannot be set as your default terminal. Those need an installed package, which needs a signed one — see Signing.

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.

Installs beside Windows Terminal

Its own package identity (WintermGhostty), its own execution alias (wtg.exe), and its own COM class IDs — so it does not replace, rename or hijack anything belonging to a real Windows Terminal install, on any channel. Settings are separate too: this starts with defaults rather than importing yours.

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.

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

Nothing here is signed, and nothing needs to be. A portable build is not installed, so Windows never asks who published it.

An MSIX is built, but it is not published: an MSIX must carry a valid signature to install at all, no signing certificate is configured for this repository, and shipping one nobody can install would be shipping a trap. If that changes, an installer comes back and this section changes with it.

Verify what you downloaded against SHA256SUMS.txt. Note the file is written with Windows line endings, so sha256sum -c may report "could not be read" — compare the hash by hand if so.

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 by .github/workflows/release.yml from the recorded upstream pins plus the tracked patch series — the inputs are all in git.