Mitchell Hashimoto releases libghostty-vt 1.0 with stable C ABI
The gist
HashiCorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto released libghostty-vt 1.0, a portable terminal-emulation C library with a stable ABI.
Neovim and KDE's Kwi can now build on it as a packaged dependency.
How it unfolded
- Dec 26, 2024Ghostty 1.0 was released and open-sourced under the MIT license.
- 2025Hashimoto wrote that libghostty was coming; at that point the Zig module had just been merged, the C API did not exist, and only Ghostty used the code.
- Oct 27, 2026Hashimoto said he planned to tag libghostty 1.0 within a few months and declare ABI stability at that point.
Key terms
- C ABI
- An interface exposed by software, usually a library, defined for in-process machine code access by a consuming program.
- terminal emulator
- A computer program that emulates a video terminal within another display architecture, often shown as a terminal window.
- MIT license
- A permissive software license from MIT that allows reuse with few restrictions and high compatibility.
Source: Wikipedia