Ghosttea 0.13.0

Ghosttea is a native Ghostty-powered terminal runtime and desktop experience for Electron applications.

This release publishes 10 npm packages and 7 Rust crates under one shared version.

Publishing note. npm had two incidents while 0.13.0 was published. The crates and eight npm packages went out on 2026-10-22 between 06:49Z and 07:04Z, and @vibecook/ghosttea-react and @vibecook/ghosttead followed at 18:37Z. Until then, npm's latest for those two was still 0.12.0. If your lockfile resolved either of them in that window, move it to 0.13.0.

Added

• Light adaptation. Under a light theme, a pane whose application paints its
  own dark background is remapped to the theme. It engages when at least 60% of
  the pane's cells carry an explicit dark background, and releases below 35%.
  Surfaces mirror their OKLab lightness around the theme background, neutral
  ink keeps its distance from its cell background, and accents land in an APCA
  mid-tone band with their hue kept. A light theme's own chromatic ANSI colors
  (1–6, 9–14) are kept where they stay legible. Programs that follow the theme
  are never touched. The WebGPU and Metal renderers both apply it.
  ghosttea-light-adaptation = auto|off controls it. It is the first Ghosttea
  extension key, accepted beside the pinned Ghostty schema, and defaults to
  auto. Embedders can pass lightAdaptation: "off" through the workspace
  theme override.
• minimum-contrast (Ghostty's key, 1–21) is applied to text glyphs and their
  decorations, preserving hue rather than snapping to black or white. Box
  drawing, block elements and color glyphs are exempt. Both settings reach
  remote views through the terminal presentation, the protocol validates them,
  and Settings → Appearance → Readability writes them, on the desktop and on
  iOS.
• TRF1 section 13 (StylePalette) carries the palette index beside the resolved
  RGB for styles whose explicit colors came from the terminal palette.
• Programs that ask for the color scheme get an answer. CSI ? 996 n is
  answered from the default background: light when dark text out-contrasts
  light text. A theme change that flips the scheme sends CSI ? 997 ; 1|2 n to
  a program that enabled mode 2031, so automatic themes follow a theme reload.
  New sessions also get COLORFGBG, unless the caller set one.
• Hosts decide who holds a routed session's geometry.
  • takeResizeControl(sessionHandle, viewId, cols, rows) takes the seat.
    Depending on the seat the runtime last saw, it claims an empty seat,
    resizes the view's own, or sends one transfer from the holder.
  • A refusal that names a different holder or revision is retried once. The
    runtime owns that retry, and a host never retries a take itself.
  • TerminalSurface and GhostteaWorkspace accept takeGeometryOnFocus
    (default false). With it, a focus gain, or a press of a pane that already
    has focus, takes the seat, but only while the surface controls resize and
    takes input. A mirror never takes.
  • On the port-pair transport a take is claimResizeControl.
• geometryHolder(sessionHandle) and the geometry-holder-changed event
  report the routed seat's holder, another client's included. The cell names a
  holder only in replies to this client's own verbs.
• sessionHasDrawn(sessionId) and the session-drawn event say when a
  session's first frame put something on screen. The cell metrics
  (CELL_WIDTH, LINE_HEIGHT, ORIGIN_X, ORIGIN_Y) are exported.
• sessionCreatedHere(sessionId) says whether this runtime created a session:
  a routed or port-backed birth, never a registered or restored one. A host can
  use it to cover the workspace's initial shell with its own unused-session
  policy.
• The workspace context's replaceSession(expectedId, replacement) replaces an
  expected pane's session atomically, keeping focus, zoom, mirrors, pane ids and
  split geometry. It returns false once that pane was detached or reassigned.
  replaceSessionInPanes is its pure form.

Changed

• Truffle 0.7.19 on both planes: truffle-core = "=0.7.19", and the Swift
  package at exactly 0.7.19 with TailscaleKit
  tailscalekit-59d4bb82-ts1.104.1-go1.27.2 (libtailscale 59d4bb82, Tailscale
  1.104.1, Go 1.27.2).
• The terminal pipeline does less work per frame:
  • Shaped rows are reused across scrolling, and each cell's glyph catalog is
    kept apart from the others.
  • Atlas pages are lazy and bounded, and their slots are reserved before
    encoding.
  • Exact unchanged rows are reused, and a retained scene scrolls its pixels
    with one shared staging texture, repainting only the exposed, edge and
    cursor rows.

Fixed

• A routed session's mouse modes reach the renderer. The wheel goes to a
  program that tracks the mouse instead of becoming arrow keys on the
  alternate screen.
• Routed input works again after a pane reattaches. Overlapping replacements
  and renewals can no longer leave a late reply on the wrong activation.
• Each control-leg geometry reply reaches the request that earned it. A
  refused release no longer takes the next claim's reply slot. The wire is
  unchanged.
• A routed holder's last grid lands when its claims overlap during a drag,
  instead of leaving the PTY at the first of the sizes.
• Terminal replies go through a bounded, ordered mailbox independent of the
  user-input queue. A saturated input queue no longer holds them back, and
  termination bypasses it.
• A write the terminal's program never reads, such as a large paste, no
  longer keeps its session alive.
• Terminal pixels survive pane transitions: workers mount with the surface's
  real geometry and keep their bitmap scale across a resize. Split groups
  equalize when a pane is removed.
• The prebuilt ghosttead daemons build against rustls 0.23.46, rustls-webpki
  0.103.16, quinn-proto 0.11.19, and webpki-roots and webpki-root-certs 1.0.10.
  These fix RUSTSEC-2026-0338 to -0342, -0346 to -0349 and -0381 to -0383 in
  the TLS and QUIC stack under the Truffle mesh transport. Crates.io consumers
  resolve their own versions.

Compatibility

• Rust consumers must move their truffle-core pin to =0.7.19. Every
  crate sharing an application-owned Truffle node must resolve the same
  version. Swift consumers get Truffle 0.7.19 through Ghosttea's exact pin.
• This is a 0.x minor release, also because public Rust structs gain fields,
  which breaks downstream exhaustive struct literals:
  • ghosttea_config::RendererConfig and TerminalPresentationConfig gain
    minimum_contrast and light_adaptation;
  • the frame's style records carry a StylePalette;
  • TextSnapshot carries shaped rows.
• The wire stays compatible. Section 13 is additive and TRF1 remains version
  1: older decoders skip it and render the same RGB, and it is omitted when no
  style has palette provenance. Older clients validate only the renderer
  fields they know.
• takeGeometryOnFocus defaults to false, so hosts that do not opt in see no
  change in who holds the seat.
• The Apple native artifact is rebuilt for this release, so Apple devices get
  section 13 and the new settings.

Packages

npm:

• @vibecook/ghosttea
• @vibecook/ghosttea-client
• @vibecook/ghosttea-electron
• @vibecook/ghosttea-frame
• @vibecook/ghosttea-native-tabs
• @vibecook/ghosttea-protocol
• @vibecook/ghosttea-react
• @vibecook/ghosttead
• @vibecook/ghosttead-darwin-arm64
• @vibecook/ghosttead-win32-x64

crates.io:

• ghosttea
• ghosttea-config
• ghosttea-core
• ghosttea-text
• ghosttea-truffle
• ghosttea-vt
• ghosttea-vt-sys

Publish order is a dependency order rather than this one; it is recorded in PUBLISHING.md.

Requirements

Node 22+ and Rust 1.88+. Native Ghostty VT artifacts are published for aarch64-apple-darwin and x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.