Guides Ghostty

libghostty

Edith links Ghostty's terminal engine through libghostty, the same C API Ghostty's own macOS app uses.

Building

make ghostty

That clones Ghostty into vendor/ghostty, checks out the pinned commit and builds vendor/GhosttyKit.xcframework. The directory is ignored by git.

What is pinned, and why


Ghostty	`88f57ee` (1.3.2-main)
Zig	0.16.0

The pin is a main commit rather than the v1.3.1 tag on purpose. Building v1.3.1 with Zig 0.15.2 produces static archives whose members are not 8-byte aligned, and the linker shipped with Xcode 26 rejects them. Ghostty's own macOS app fails to link the same way, so this is not something Edith can configure around. The pinned commit builds clean.

Upstream states in build.zig that libghostty "is not stable for general purpose use", so the commit is pinned exactly and upgrades are deliberate.

Using it

ghostty_init has to run before any other call, or the first call segfaults.

let rc = ghostty_init(UInt(CommandLine.argc), CommandLine.unsafeArgv)

A surface renders into an NSView handed to it through ghostty_surface_config_s.platform.macos.nsview, and takes its process settings from command, env_vars and working_directory, which is what TerminalLaunchRequest already carries.