About Wintty

Wintty is a terminal for Windows built on the Ghostty core. It aims to be fast, feature-rich, and genuinely native: a WinUI 3 shell, a DirectX 12 renderer, and Windows integration that behaves the way Windows applications are expected to behave.

Ghostty is the work of Mitchell Hashimoto and the broader Ghostty team. The terminal emulation in Wintty, the VT parsing, the screen model, the font handling, is theirs. Wintty does not reimplement any of it and has no interest in doing so.

Ghostty was a passion project. So is this. Wintty started because I am unapologetically a fan of that work and wanted it on one of the machines I use the most.

There is a bigger reason too. Ghostty is not just a nice terminal, it is a fundamental atom: a correct, fast, embeddable terminal core that combines with other pieces to build the infrastructure layer of the modern inner development loop. That loop is increasingly driven by AI tooling that lives in a terminal, and the quality of the terminal underneath stops being a detail. A core that is correct and fast is worth building on. That is what libghostty is, and it is what Wintty is built from.

If you are on macOS or Linux, you want ghostty.org. Wintty exists for Windows.

Wintty is a native Windows application. The GUI is written in C# and uses WinUI 3. It wraps libghostty.dll through P/Invoke. All terminal emulation stays in Zig, shared with Ghostty.

Being native means using real Windows components for tabs, splits, dialogs and menus rather than drawing custom widgets in the terminal grid. It means keyboard conventions that match the rest of the platform, so the shortcuts you already use work here. And it means integrating with capabilities that only exist on Windows, such as jump lists, taskbar progress, Mica and Acrylic backdrops, and a UI Automation provider so screen readers can read the terminal.

Those last ones are the reason a fork exists rather than a patch set. They have no equivalent upstream, so they do not belong there.

Features split into two kinds.

Terminal features are what programs running inside the terminal can use: the Kitty graphics protocol, hyperlinks, light and dark mode notifications, synchronized output, and the rest of the sequences documented in the Terminal API. These come from the Ghostty core, so a program that works in Ghostty works here.

Application features are what you interact with directly: tabs, splits, the quick terminal, the command palette, theme switching that follows the system, and a settings UI.

Rendering goes through DirectX 12 with DXGI swap chains and DirectComposition. The aim is not to win benchmark arguments; it is that scrolling, throughput and startup should never be the thing you notice about your terminal.

Speed in a terminal is several different things at once: startup time, scrolling, IO throughput, control sequence throughput, frame rates. The claim here is a modest one, that Wintty should be in the same class as the terminals people consider fast, not that it beats all of them at everything.

The architecture is what makes this possible. libghostty is a cross-platform, C-ABI compatible library providing terminal emulation, font handling and rendering primitives. GUI applications are consumers of it.

That separation is the whole point. It lets a Windows shell be written in the language and framework that Windows actually wants, without forking the terminal emulation underneath. It is also why the Ghostty project's ambition of a shared core that other terminals can build on is not theoretical: Wintty is an instance of it.

Note

libghostty is not yet a stable public API and has not been released as a standalone library. Wintty tracks the Ghostty source directly rather than depending on a released version.