WingHostty is a terminal emulator for Windows designed to provide developers with a feature-rich, native experience. Built using Ghostty's terminal core, it offers robust VT parsing, scrollback, and shell integration while running as a standalone Win32 application.
Key Features:
Native Win32 Runtime: Includes a tab bar, per-monitor DPI scaling, DWM dark title bar support, IME functionality, drag-and-drop, and native right-click menus.
OpenGL Renderer: Utilizes OpenGL 4.3 for rendering, ensuring smooth performance.
Shell Integration: Supports PowerShell, cmd, Git Bash, and optional WSL integration through an in-app profile picker.
Session Restore: Maintains window shape, tabs, splits, profiles, working directories, and titles across sessions.
GitHub Releases Updater: Checks for updates and verifies downloads using GitHub's public API.
Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for developers comfortable with configuring terminal applications. WingHostty provides a highly customizable experience tailored to Windows users, enhancing productivity through seamless shell integration and native runtime features. It is particularly suited for those who prioritize feature richness and platform-specific optimization without external dependencies or cross-platform concerns.
Installable via winget, WingHostty offers a stable and efficient terminal solution for Windows developers.
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.
Status, honestly
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.
Release 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.
First run
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 = Dracula
Reload 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.
Privacy, updates, and crashes
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.
Build from source
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=true
Output 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.
Relationship to Ghostty
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.
dist/windows/ and scripts/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.
Contributing
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.