Ghostty for Pragtical

Terminal tabs and a bottom drawer for Pragtical, with colors that follow your editor theme. Powered by libghostty-vt through LuaJIT FFI.

Installation

Requires Pragtical with LuaJIT and SDL3. Binaries support Linux and macOS on x86_64/aarch64, and Windows 10 version 1809 or later on x86_64.

Install through Pragtical's plugin manager:

pragtical pm repo add https://github.com/pragtical/ghostty.git:latest
pragtical pm install ghostty

The plugin manager downloads the plugin and its runtime libraries. Restart Pragtical after installation.

Using the terminal

Shortcut	Action
Alt+T	Show or hide the terminal drawer
Shift+Alt+T	Open or focus the terminal drawer
Ctrl+Shift+`	Open a terminal tab
Ctrl+Shift+C	Copy the terminal selection
Ctrl+Shift+V	Paste
Ctrl+Shift+W	Close the terminal

On macOS, Cmd+C and Cmd+V also copy and paste. Ctrl+C sends an interrupt to the terminal program. Editor shortcuts such as Ctrl+Shift+P for the command palette and Ctrl+Tab for switching tabs remain available.

New sessions start in the current project directory. Hiding the drawer keeps its process running. Successful shells close automatically; failed sessions stay open so you can read their output.

• Drag to select text, or double-click to select a word and drag to extend it. Hold Shift to select or scroll when a terminal program captures mouse input.
• Use the mouse wheel or drag the right scrollbar to browse scrollback. The scrollbar appears when the terminal has saved lines above the visible screen.
• Ctrl-click links or path:line:column references to open them; use Cmd-click on macOS. Change this under Ghostty Terminal → Open Links Modifier.
• Drop files into the terminal to insert their quoted paths.
• Find more actions in the command palette by searching for ghostty, including clearing the screen, scrolling, and running a command with ghostty:spawn-agent.

If a program crashes or is killed with Ctrl+\, it can leave mouse reporting enabled, making clicks type escape codes at the shell prompt. Open the command palette with Ctrl+Shift+P, run Ghostty: Reset, then press Enter for a fresh prompt. Reset clears the screen and scrollback and restores terminal modes; the shell keeps running. Use it after returning to the shell.

Fonts and colors

The terminal uses Pragtical's code font, including its fallback fonts. For additional symbols commonly used by terminal applications, add these fallbacks after your preferred code font in Settings → Core → Editor → Code Font:

• JuliaMono Regular
• MesloLGS NF Regular

The first 16 ANSI colors are generated from your Pragtical theme and update when you change it. Programs can also use 256 colors and truecolor.

Configuration

Open Settings → Plugins → Ghostty Terminal to change the shell, drawer height, scrollback, link modifier, and clipboard options. Shell and link modifier changes apply to new terminals.

For additional options, edit your Pragtical user configuration:

local config = require "core.config"

config.plugins.ghostty.close_on_exit = "clean_exit" -- "always" or "never"
config.plugins.ghostty.environment = { MY_VARIABLE = "value" }

-- Optional: poll every 5 ms instead of following the editor's FPS setting.
config.plugins.ghostty.poll_interval = 0.005

Polling follows the current FPS setting by default, including Auto FPS. Set poll_interval = nil to restore this behavior after using a fixed interval.

The default shell comes from SHELL or Windows' COMSPEC, falling back to /bin/sh or cmd.exe. You can choose another shell, such as /bin/zsh or pwsh.exe, in Settings. Set arguments to a list of startup flags, or {} to suppress the defaults.

Clipboard writes requested by terminal programs and potentially unsafe pastes ask for confirmation by default. The terminal uses xterm-256color; choosing xterm-ghostty requires installing Ghostty's terminfo separately.

See the full reference for appearance overrides, shell options, events, and opening terminals from Lua.

Building from source

You need Zig 0.16.0, a C toolchain with libc headers and strip, Python 3, Meson, and Ninja. On macOS, install the Xcode command-line tools. On Windows, use an MSYS2 UCRT64 shell.

From this checkout, with Zig on PATH:

meson setup build --buildtype=release
meson compile -C build
python3 scripts/stage-libraries.py build plugins/ghostty

Copy plugins/ghostty, including both runtime libraries, into Pragtical's user plugins directory and restart the editor. On Linux, the default location is:

pragtical_userdir="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/pragtical"
mkdir -p "$pragtical_userdir/plugins/ghostty"
cp -r plugins/ghostty/. "$pragtical_userdir/plugins/ghostty/"

For other platforms, use the user directory shown by Pragtical. The build guide covers compiler paths, existing builds, cross-compilation, and packaging.

License

MIT. Ghostty's license is included in plugins/ghostty/LICENSE.ghostty.