libghostty 1.0: Stable Terminal Emulation Library

libghostty-vt 1.0 declares a stable API and ABI guarantee, enabling standard distribution packaging and safe dynamic linking. Spun out from the Ghostty terminal, the 1.0 release commits to semantic versioning and enforces compatibility through continuous integration testing.

The library has rapidly captured production use. JetBrains IDEs adopted libghostty for their terminal emulator, now reaching over 12.5 million users. Neovim’s maintainers have approved a migration from their current terminal library, awaiting this stable release before merging. Vercel’s Turborepo, devenv, OrbStack, and newer terminals like herdr and cmux have deployed it. Language bindings support Rust, Go, JavaScript, Swift, Python, .NET, Elixir, Dart, and Java.

The library targets minimal resource footprint and broad platform support. It depends only on libc at runtime and spawns no threads, handling 10,000 concurrent terminals on four cores with 8GB memory. It builds on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, FreeBSD, and WebAssembly. MIT-licensed with permissive dependencies and no copyleft code, the library simplifies packaging across distributions.