FAQ

June 4, 2026 · View on GitHub

Short, opinionated answers to recurring questions.

Hollow vs. other terminals

How is Hollow different from WezTerm?

WezTerm is the closest analogue. Hollow's design goals are the same: treat configuration as code, lean on Lua, ship a real terminal emulator. The differences are mostly structural:

Hollow is built on Zig (vs. Rust) and uses libghostty-vt (vs. WezTerm's own VTE-derived parser).
Hollow is Windows-first; WezTerm is cross-platform from day one.
Hollow ships an HTP-style protocol for shell-to-host integration; WezTerm uses a similar model.
Hollow's plugin system is git-clone based, similar to lazy.nvim-style plugin managers.

You can. Ghostty is excellent. Hollow adds a Lua scripting layer and a richer pane/workspace model on top of a Ghostty-derived VT core. If you do not need Lua and want the polished, well-supported experience, use Ghostty. If you want to script the terminal itself, Hollow is the option.

Why not Alacritty?

Alacritty is fast and minimal. It is intentionally not programmable beyond its TOML config. Hollow treats the Lua runtime as a first-class extension surface and ships a widget model on top of it.

Configuration

Should I copy `conf/init.lua` into my override?

No. The override is merged on top of the base, so a small personal init.lua with just the keys you want to change is enough. Copying the whole base file forks it and makes upgrades harder.

How do I know which keys the runtime actually read?

hollow.config.snapshot() returns the merged config. Print it from a one-shot script:

print(require("hollow").json.encode(hollow.config.snapshot()))

Where does Hollow look for fonts?

./hollow.exe --list-fonts lists everything Hollow sees on the current host. The same inventory is available in Lua via hollow.fonts.list(), hollow.fonts.find(query), hollow.fonts.has(...), and hollow.fonts.pick(candidates).

Shell integration

Do I have to use HTP?

No. HTP is opt-in. Without it, panes still work, but pane.cwd and foreground_process fall back to whatever the host can infer.

For ambient metadata, the shell-side helpers in shell-integration/ are the lightest path. For one-shot automation, the native hollow cli … is faster and does not need a tty.

`hollow cli` or `hollow-cli`?

	`hollow cli …`	`hollow-cli`
Talks to	Host command socket	OSC over tty
Needs a tty	no	yes
Needs shell integration	no	yes
Best for	scripts, CI, automation	prompt hooks

Both ship. The native subcommand is the recommended path for host-side automation. See CLI index.

Plugins

Where are my plugins stored?

hollow.fs.data_dir() .. "/plugins". On Windows that is %APPDATA%\hollow\plugins. The directory is created on first use.

How do I update a plugin?

hollow.plugins.sync()

It walks every declared plugin and runs git pull --ff-only --recurse-submodules. Restart Hollow to pick up new code.

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