ghostty-web

Ghostty for the web with xterm.js API compatibility — giving you a proper VT100 implementation in the browser.

• 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.

Try It

• Live Demo on an ephemeral VM (thank you to Greg from disco.cloud for hosting).

• On your computer:

  npx @ghostty-web/demo@next
  

  This starts a loopback-only HTTP server with a real shell on http://127.0.0.1:8080. The demo protects /ws with a per-run same-origin token and rejects cross-origin WebSocket handshakes. Works best on Linux and macOS.

  To intentionally bind somewhere else, set HOST=<host>. If you serve the demo through extra hostnames or a wildcard bind such as HOST=0.0.0.0, also set GHOSTTY_ALLOWED_HOSTS=host1,host2. Avoid remote exposure unless you understand the risk: the demo starts a real local shell.

Comparison with xterm.js

xterm.js is everywhere—VS Code, Hyper, countless web terminals. But it has fundamental issues:

Issue	xterm.js	ghostty-web
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.

Installation

npm install ghostty-web

Usage

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.

Development

ghostty-web builds from Ghostty's source with a patch to expose additional functionality.

Requires Zig and Bun.

bun run build

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.

License

MIT