@termless/ghostty-native

Native Ghostty backend for termless — headless terminal emulation using Ghostty's VT Zig module via napigen N-API bindings.

Same VT processing as the Ghostty terminal emulator, running natively (no WASM overhead). Compare with @termless/ghostty which uses the WASM build.

Build

Requires Zig 0.15.2+ (available via nix).

# From the ghostty-native package directory:
bash build/build.sh

# Or via the termless CLI:
bunx termless backends install ghostty-native

The first build fetches the ghostty source (~large download, cached after).

Architecture

TypeScript backend (src/backend.ts)
  └── N-API bindings (native/src/main.zig) — via napigen
        └── ghostty-vt Zig module — Ghostty's terminal emulation core

• napigen — comptime N-API bindings for Zig (single toolchain, no Rust needed)
• ghostty-vt Zig module — current binding target; exposes Ghostty's VT parser, terminal state, screen, cells, cursor, and scrollback directly to the Zig bridge
• libghostty-vt C API — future migration target once upstream tags or declares the C signatures stable enough for external bindings
• Uses Ghostty's Zig terminal/screen/cell APIs for cell-by-cell reading
• Uses Ghostty's Zig formatter helpers for bulk text extraction

API

import { createGhosttyNativeBackend } from "@termless/ghostty-native"

const backend = createGhosttyNativeBackend({ cols: 80, rows: 24 })
backend.feed(new TextEncoder().encode("Hello, world!\r\n"))
console.log(backend.getText())
backend.destroy()

Pinned version

Built against ghostty v1.3.1 (332b2aef). The stable C API migration is tracked in km as @km/termless/libghostty-stable-api.