Vesta

A native macOS terminal for running AI coding agents in parallel —
built on real libghostty, driven by a scriptable CLI.

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Vesta is a Swift/AppKit terminal that links GhosttyKit.xcframework (it is not a Ghostty fork). It renders with Ghostty's Metal engine, reads your existing ~/.config/ghostty/config as-is, and adds a project sidebar, tmux-style splits, and an agent-control CLI on top.

Highlights

• Real libghostty — Ghostty's Metal renderer, your ghostty config and theme, zero reimplemented terminal logic.
• Persistent sessions (tmux-style) — shells survive Vesta quitting and reattach cleanly. A small daemon (vestad) holds the PTYs; panes connect through a relay (vesta-attach). Prefix-key mode for tmux muscle memory. Restore is lazy: at launch only the visible session reattaches; the rest stay listed in the sidebar and attach instantly on first click, so a big saved workspace opens fast. Until a restored session is first activated it won't ring the attention dot (its shell keeps running under the daemon regardless, and plugin pane-output taps still work).
• Projects → sessions sidebar — vertical, drag-resizable. Each project owns sessions; rename / recolor / remove from the right-click menu.
• Native splits — ⌘D / ⌘⇧D, click-to-focus, zoom, drag dividers.
• Command palette — ⌘⇧P opens a searchable list of every action (splits, sessions, browser pane, settings…) plus your plugins' vesta.command entries.
• Scriptable — the vesta CLI drives and reads the live UI over a Unix socket, so agents can orchestrate it.
• Notifications — vesta.notify from a plugin shows a stacking in-app toast, records it in a titlebar bell (history persists across restarts), and posts a macOS Notification Center banner when Vesta is backgrounded (or when forced).
• Self-updating — when a newer release exists, a badge appears at the sidebar bottom; click it to download, install (in place), and relaunch — no manual DMG.
• Pick your app icon — Settings ▸ App Icon swaps between a clean white flame, a pink one, and ten progressively "corrupted" stages (or click the icon in the About panel to cycle them). The choice is written onto the .app bundle, so it sticks in Finder/Dock across quits and survives in-place updates.
• Everything from your config — colors, fonts, sidebar width, divider width are all vesta-* keys in the same ghostty config file. Empty config = sane defaults.

Build & run

No setup needed — swift build fetches the prebuilt GhosttyKit framework (libghostty) automatically via a checksum-verified release asset.

swift build                                       # auto-fetches GhosttyKit on first build
.build/arm64-apple-macosx/debug/vesta            # run the app (dev)
swift run vesta selfcheck                          # pure-logic checks
./install.sh                                      # copy vesta + vestad + vesta-attach → /usr/local/bin (CLI)

./make-app.sh                                     # build Vesta.app (double-clickable, logo icon)
open Vesta.app                                     # launch the bundle

The raw debug binary is bundle-less and dies if its launching shell exits (use nohup .build/.../vesta & disown). ./make-app.sh packages a proper Vesta.app — logo dock icon, "Vesta" menu, double-click launch, detached lifetime. The binary is self-contained (ghostty is statically linked).

The vesta CLI

Drives the running app over ~/Library/Application Support/vesta/control.sock. vesta help is authoritative; the common verbs:

vesta help                       # list every verb + config key
vesta open <path>                # new session at <path>
vesta split -v | -h              # split the focused pane (side-by-side / stacked)
vesta new-pane --cwd <path>      # new pane in a dir
vesta focus <id> | vesta focus next
vesta zoom                       # toggle zoom on the focused pane
vesta close                      # close the focused pane
vesta send-keys <target> <text>  # type into a pane + run it (target = pane id or "focused"; --no-enter to skip the Return)
vesta send-keys --all|--session <P.S>|--project <name> <text>   # broadcast: focused session's panes / session P.S / all of a project (reply: pane count)
vesta capture                    # dump the focused pane's screen
vesta pane status <paneID>       # JSON for one pane: cwd, title, alive, attention
vesta list                       # the focused session's panes (+ tab index/count)
vesta tab new|next|prev|close    # tab control
vesta sessions [--json] [--project <name>]   # list sessions; --json for structured records (id, name, cwd, panes, active/attention; --project implies --json)
vesta kill <id>                  # end a session's shell (by paneID)
vesta notify [--desktop] [--title <t>] <msg>   # toast + bell; desktop banner when backgrounded (--desktop forces)

Multiplexer & sessions

Shells run under a small daemon (vestad), not the app, so they survive Vesta quitting and reattach cleanly. The daemon owns one forkpty'd shell per pane and keeps the last ~256 KB of its raw output; on attach it replays those bytes and ghostty re-renders them — colors, cursor, full-screen apps and all (no separate screen model, so nothing to garble). On by default; set vesta-persist = false for plain non-persistent shells.

What you get:

• Survive quit — ⌘Q, reopen Vesta: panes come back with their shells and recent output.
• Close ends the shell — ⌘W closes the focused pane (a non-last pane detaches; the last pane closes and kills its session). ⌘⇧W closes and kills the session. Shells survive only across window-close / ⌘Q quit, and reattach on relaunch. To keep a shell but drop the pane, prefix-d (detach).
• Prefix mode — tmux muscle memory. Press the prefix (ctrl+b by default, vesta-prefix), then a key (table below). Empty vesta-prefix disables it.
• Explicit kill — prefix-x, or vesta kill <id> — when you actually mean to end the shell.

Verify it works

# 1. survive quit
#    in a pane:   echo i-was-here && date
#    ⌘Q, reopen Vesta.app → the pane shows that output again.

# 2. detached sessions survive
#    close the window (not ⌘⇧W) → its shells keep running; relaunch → they reattach.
#    or prefix-d a pane to detach it (shell lives on under vestad).

# 3. from the CLI, watch the daemon hold sessions
vesta sessions            # lists live + detached sessions with attach counts
vesta kill <id>           # ends one for real

If a pane ever says "daemon protocol … update Vesta", an old vestad from a previous build is still running (pkill -f vestad, then relaunch) — the daemon is single-instance per user.

Prefix keytable (after ctrl+b)

Key	Action	Key	Action
%	split vertical	c	new session
"	split horizontal	n / p	next / prev session
h j k l / arrows	focus pane	,	rename session
z	zoom pane	d	detach pane
x	kill shell

Override bindings with vesta-prefix-bind = key:action, … in your ghostty config.

Configuration

Vesta reads vesta-* keys from your ghostty config (libghostty ignores them). Standard ghostty keys (theme, background, foreground, cursor-color, palette = N=#hex) apply live. Every vesta-* default matches the built-in look, so an untouched config changes nothing.

Key	Default	Meaning
vesta-accent	theme accent	accent color (rings, dots, focus ticks)
vesta-surface	theme background	base surface color
vesta-sidebar-width	224	sidebar open width (px)
vesta-font-family	GeistMono	chrome label font
vesta-font-mono	MartianMono	mono font
vesta-font-size	13	chrome font size
vesta-divider-width	8	split divider grab width (1px hairline drawn)
vesta-projects	—	comma-separated project paths to preload
vesta-persist	true	run shells under vestad (survive quit); false = plain shells
vesta-persist-scrollback	false	mirror scrollback to disk so it survives a daemon restart. Off by default — terminal output can contain secrets (see SECURITY.md)
vesta-prefix	ctrl+b	prefix key for tmux-style mode; empty = disabled
vesta-prefix-bind	—	override prefix bindings: key:action, …

Keybindings

Keys	Action
⌘D / ⌘⇧D	split vertical / horizontal
⌘W / ⌘⇧W	close pane / close session
⌘T	new session in active project (cwd = project dir)
⌘]	focus next pane
⌘{ / ⌘}	previous / next session
⌘1–⌘9	select session N
⌘B	toggle sidebar
⌘⇧P	command palette (search + run any action or plugin command)
ctrl+b then a key	prefix mode (see Multiplexer & sessions)

Click a pane to focus it; click a project to expand it; right-click a project to rename / recolor / remove it. ⌘W closes the focused pane; ⌘⇧W closes and kills its session — see Multiplexer & sessions.

Architecture

• Sources/Vesta/Ghostty/ — libghostty init, config sync, runtime callbacks.
• TerminalPane.swift — a ghostty surface (input / IME / mouse / resize / cwd / title).
• PaneTree.swift — tmux-style splits as nested NSSplitViews.
• Tabs.swift — the Workspace model: projects own sessions.
• Chrome.swift — window, titlebar, sidebar rendering.
• Control.swift — the vesta CLI + socket server.
• GhosttyConfig.swift — Theme + VestaConfig (the vesta-* keys).
• Git.swift — branch / status, shelled out off-main.
• PrefixMode.swift — tmux-style prefix mode.
• Sources/vestad/ — the session daemon: one forkpty'd shell per pane + a raw output ring, replayed on attach. No terminal parsing (ghostty does that).
• Sources/vesta-attach/ — the per-pane relay ghostty spawns as its command; a dumb byte pump between the pane and the daemon over a 0600 unix socket.
• Sources/VestaMux/ — shared wire protocol (MuxProtocol) + paths (MuxPaths).

Roadmap

Designs live in docs/superpowers/specs/. Shipped: persistent sessions (2026-06-25-mux-rawring-rewrite.md) — vestad/vesta-attach raw-ring multiplexer, prefix mode. Deferred there: mirroring (one session in two panes), remote attach (vesta attach ssh://), and inline-image replay across detach. (Disk-spill scrollback later shipped as vesta-persist-scrollback.) Also in flight: cmux parity (2026-06-22-cmux-parity-design.md) — worktree-isolated sessions, attention rings, richer sidebar, embedded browser pane.

Self-checks

.build/arm64-apple-macosx/debug/vesta selfcheck   # config, control, git, workspace, chrome