Ghostty for the web with xterm.js API compatibility — giving you a proper VT100 implementation in the browser, not a JavaScript approximation of one.
- Migrate from xterm by changing your import:
@xterm/xterm→ghostty-web - WASM-compiled parser from Ghostty—the same code that runs the native app
- Zero runtime dependencies, ~400KB WASM bundle
Originally created for Mux (a desktop app for isolated, parallel agentic development), but designed to be used anywhere.
npx @ghostty-web/demo@nextThis starts a local HTTP server with a real shell on http://localhost:8080. Works best on Linux and macOS.
xterm.js is everywhere—VS Code, Hyper, countless web terminals. But it has fundamental issues:
| Issue | xterm.js | ghostty-web |
|---|---|---|
| RTL languages | Broken since 2017 | ✓ Works |
| Complex scripts (Devanagari, Arabic) | Rendering issues | ✓ Proper grapheme handling |
| XTPUSHSGR/XTPOPSGR | Not supported | ✓ Full support |
xterm.js reimplements terminal emulation in JavaScript. Every escape sequence, every edge case, every Unicode quirk—all hand-coded. Ghostty's emulator is the same battle-tested code that runs the native Ghostty app.
ghostty-web aims to be API-compatible with the xterm.js API.
import { init, Terminal } from 'ghostty-web';
await init();
const term = new Terminal({
fontSize: 14,
theme: {
background: '#1a1b26',
foreground: '#a9b1d6',
},
});
term.open(document.getElementById('terminal'));
term.onData((data) => websocket.send(data));
websocket.onmessage = (e) => term.write(e.data);For a comprehensive client <-> server example, refer to the demo.
ghostty-web builds from Ghostty's source with a patch to expose additional functionality.
Requires Zig and Bun.
Mitchell Hashimoto (author of Ghostty) has been working on libghostty which makes this all possible. The patches are very minimal thanks to the work the Ghostty team has done, and we expect them to get smaller.
This library will eventually consume a native Ghostty WASM distribution once available, and will continue to provide an xterm.js compatible API.
At Coder we're big fans of Ghostty, so kudos to that team for all the amazing work.