libghostty-vt 1.0

Software that embeds a terminal no longer has to write its own emulator or depend on an unversioned one. Mitchell Hashimoto announced libghostty-vt 1.0 on 6 November 2026, extracted from the core of Ghostty, with the library and its C ABI both declared stable under semantic versioning.

## How the stability promise is enforced

The API uses opaque handles, enum-keyed getters and setters, and sized structs with reserved padding, so new values can be added later. Continuous integration checks the ABI with libabigail on Linux and with golden type manifests on macOS and WebAssembly. Versioned symbols on ELF platforms make a mismatched library fail at load time.

## Who already builds on it

The post names JetBrains IDE terminals, Vercel's Turborepo, devenv, Antithesis, OrbStack and others, along with an approved Neovim pull request to replace libvterm that waits on a tagged release. KDE developers are experimenting with it for a Konsole replacement.

## Limits to check

The default build links libc, and only a build with SIMD disabled is freestanding. Some platforms, including bare-metal RISC-V and ARM, WASI and illumos, are built in CI but not tested.

## Key facts

**Maker:** Mitchell Hashimoto and the Ghostty project **Launched:** 6 November 2026 **Licence:** MIT **Price:** free **Website:** mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-1-0

Not yet independently verified: The usage figures are the author's own, and he says they are rough because most users of the library do not report usage; the JetBrains number is credited to a JetBrains report we did not read. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.