mightty

mightty is a small GPU-powered terminal emulator prototype built with Rust, GPUI, platform PTYs, and Ghostty's libghostty-vt.

It is currently Windows-first, with Windows shell I/O through ConPTY and Unix shell I/O through a forkpty-backed bridge.

Features

• GPU-rendered terminal UI through GPUI.
• Terminal emulation through libghostty-vt.
• Windows shell I/O through ConPTY.
• Unix shell I/O through forkpty.
• Tabs in a compact left sidebar.
• Right and down pane splits.
• Active pane and tab closing.
• Embedded JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono for terminal text.
• Feedback capture with Ctrl+Shift+F12.

Stack

• GPUI for UI rendering.
• gpui-component for the root component wrapper.
• libghostty-vt for the Ghostty VT engine.
• Windows ConPTY and Unix forkpty for shell process integration.

Requirements

• Rust with edition 2024 support.
• Zig 0.15.2.
• The Ghostty checkout at ghostty/, used by .cargo/config.toml as GHOSTTY_SOURCE_DIR.
• Local JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono files under fonts/JetBrainsMono/.
• Windows for the primary shell bridge target, or a Unix platform for the forkpty bridge.

This repo includes a .mise.toml pin for Zig:

mise install

You can also set ZIG to a specific Zig executable.

Build

cargo build
cargo build --release

The libghostty-vt-sys dependency builds Ghostty's VT library during Cargo builds. This repo's .cargo/config.toml points GHOSTTY_SOURCE_DIR at the local ghostty/ checkout so normal Cargo commands do not need to fetch Ghostty.

cargo build

Run

cargo run

The default shell is pwsh.exe on Windows and $SHELL on Unix.

Development

Useful checks:

cargo fmt
cargo check
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test

Useful runtime shortcuts:

• Ctrl+T: open a new tab.
• Ctrl+B: hide or show the tab sidebar.
• Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9: switch to an existing tab.
• Alt+Enter: split the active pane to the right.
• Alt+Shift+Enter: split the active pane downward.
• Ctrl+D: close the active pane, or close the active tab when it has one pane.
• Ctrl+Shift+F12: write a terminal feedback capture to captures/.

Project Layout

src/
├── main.rs              # App entry point and window setup
├── lib.rs               # Library module exports
├── feedback.rs          # Feedback capture output
├── pane_container.rs    # Tabs, sidebar, pane actions, and key bindings
├── split.rs             # Orientation-aware terminal split tree
├── widget/
│   ├── mod.rs           # Terminal widget lifecycle and GPUI task wiring
│   ├── pty.rs           # Wake-driven PTY worker bridge
│   ├── input.rs         # GPUI key event to libghostty-vt key encoding
│   ├── render.rs        # Terminal cell rendering
│   └── capture.rs       # Terminal-state feedback snapshot
├── ghostty/mod.rs       # Project facade over the libghostty-vt crate
└── shell/
    ├── windows.rs       # Windows ConPTY implementation
    └── unix.rs          # Unix forkpty implementation

License

MIT