A Windows terminal emulator that reuses Ghostty's terminal core under a native Win32 front end.
Native Win32 runtime · OpenGL renderer · Shared terminal core with Ghostty
Releases · Getting started · Windows · Status · Windows capability matrix · Hacking · Contributing · Security
winghostty is a terminal emulator for Windows. It pairs the Ghostty terminal core — VT parser, screen and scrollback, font pipeline, and renderer, forked from ghostty-org/ghostty — with a native Win32 application runtime written for this fork: a real Windows tab bar, splits, per-monitor DPI scaling, DWM dark title bar, IME, drag-and-drop, native context menus, and a WSL-aware shell picker.
It also ships libghostty-vt, the Ghostty VT library, as a retained
deliverable for Zig and C consumers.
It's built for developers who are comfortable editing a plain-text config file and clicking through a SmartScreen warning on first install.
winghostty is a young, single-maintainer fork (first fork commit 2026-04-06, first public release 2026-04-16). It supports Windows 10 and 11 on x64 and ARM64, and it runs as its own top-level app window — installing it alongside Windows Terminal, WezTerm, or Alacritty is fine. macOS and Linux app runtimes are not shipped from this repo and are not planned.
What works today, what's experimental, and what's out of scope is tracked precisely in docs/status.md; for a row-by-row mapping against official Ghostty docs, see docs/windows-capability-matrix.md.
Questions and feedback go to Discussions — GitHub Issues are reserved for reproducible bugs.
Latest stable release: winghostty 1.3.120, published 2026-07-26.
Download directly from Releases:
| File | Use when |
|---|---|
winghostty-1.3.120-windows-x64-setup.exe |
You want a normal x64 install with a Start menu entry. |
winghostty-1.3.120-windows-arm64-setup.exe |
You want a normal ARM64 install with a Start menu entry. |
winghostty-1.3.120-windows-x64-portable.zip |
You want to run x64 without installing. |
winghostty-1.3.120-windows-arm64-portable.zip |
You want to run ARM64 without installing. |
SHA256SUMS-windows-x64.txt |
Verifying x64 downloads. |
SHA256SUMS-windows-arm64.txt |
Verifying ARM64 downloads. |
The legacy SHA256SUMS.txt
file remains an x64 auto-update compatibility alias.
WinGet users can install the official manifest:
winget install AmanThanvi.winghosttyScoop users can install from the fork-owned bucket:
scoop bucket add winghostty https://github.com/amanthanvi/scoop-winghostty
scoop install winghostty/winghosttyRelease installers and the Windows binaries inside the portable ZIP are Authenticode-signed (the ZIP container itself is checksummed, not signed), but SmartScreen may still warn on first run while publisher reputation builds. The full walkthrough — installer, portable, SmartScreen, uninstall — is in docs/getting-started.md.
On first launch, winghostty writes a config template to
%LOCALAPPDATA%\winghostty\config.ghostty. The template sets no options —
defaults live in the binary. A minimal config:
font-family = JetBrains Mono
font-size = 12
# Pick a theme from: winghostty +list-themes
# Theme files are config files; only use themes from sources you trust.
theme = DraculaReload config without restarting: Ctrl + Shift + ,
A few keybindings to get moving — Ctrl+Shift+T for a new tab,
Ctrl+Shift+Backslash / Ctrl+Shift+E to split, Alt+Arrow to move between
panes, and Ctrl+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+V for copy and paste. The full table,
plus the rebind grammar, is in
docs/getting-started.md.
winghostty sends no telemetry and no analytics. The only outbound network
call is the GitHub Releases updater (when you enable auto-update), which
checks at most once every 24 hours and never replaces binaries silently.
Update installation remains user-initiated.
Crash reports are never uploaded — dumps stay local under
%LOCALAPPDATA%\winghostty\crash, readable with winghostty +crash-report.
If a broken config or session state blocks launch, winghostty --safe-mode
starts once with built-in defaults.
Updater verification, crash-report details, and diagnostic bundles are documented in docs/windows.md.
Most users should install from Releases. Building needs Windows 10/11 on x64 or ARM64, Zig 0.15.x (patch ≥ 2), Visual Studio 2022 with the MSVC toolchain on PATH, and Git for Windows:
zig build -Demit-exe=trueOutput lands at zig-out\bin\winghostty.exe. Toolchain details, dependency
cache seeding, the pre-configured dev shell, and test commands are in
HACKING.md. Building the installer and portable ZIP
yourself is covered in PACKAGING.md.
winghostty is a fork, not a re-implementation. Upstream is tracked as the
upstream Git remote, and the fork relationship is visible in full Git
history.
Shared with upstream Ghostty
src/terminal/— VT parsing, screen state, scrollback, search, Kitty graphics protocol, OSC handlingsrc/font/— font discovery and rasterization (HarfBuzz, FreeType)src/renderer/— OpenGL cell/image/shader pipelinesrc/input/,src/config/,src/termio/,src/crash/,src/shell-integration/,src/inspector/,libghostty-vt
New in this fork
src/apprt/win32.zig— Win32 application runtimesrc/apprt/win32_theme.zig— theme tokens, DWM integration, accent helpers, high-contrast handlingsrc/update/github_releases.zig— updaterdist/windows/andscripts/package-windows.ps1— Windows packaging
Removed from this fork
- Upstream
macos/Xcode project - Upstream
src/apprt/gtk/runtime - Flatpak / Snap / Linux desktop packaging
Because the terminal core is shared, most Ghostty configuration options, themes, and shell-integration behavior apply here directly. When Windows-native behavior conflicts with upstream cross-platform behavior, this fork prefers the Windows-native result.
Bug reports, reproducible issues, and focused PRs are welcome. Read CONTRIBUTING.md and AI_POLICY.md first. For usage questions and design discussion, use Discussions.
MIT. Copyright © 2024 Mitchell Hashimoto, Ghostty contributors. See LICENSE.
Fork-specific changes are contributed under the same license by the fork's maintainer and contributors.