# libghostty

39 Hacker News commenters recommended libghostty and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free, reusable terminal emulation core that developers embed in their own terminals and tools, praised for speed and easy integration.

## Why people recommend it

- Powers many third-party terminals (10 comments): "libghostty is stellar! I'm using it for my session persistence for terminal processes tool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116251)) "I rewrote text viewer applications, and a terminal emulator chrome that uses libghostty." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261144)) "It's powered by libghostty so it has support for all the stuff a modern terminal can do" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890737))
- Easy to embed and integrate (6 comments): "Having incorporated libghostty into my current web-based project, I can't say enough thanks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47208547)) "It was so easy to get the terminal functionality going with libghostty." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207988)) "which will probably be fairly easy to integrate with C apps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48792827))
- Full terminal features and fast rendering (5 comments): "libghostty will have excellent compatibility and features rather than an elisp implementation that maybe half baked." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47614952)) "It's powered by libghostty so it has support for all the stuff a modern terminal can do" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47890737)) "libghostty supports a lot of features I don't foresee making their way into Alacritty." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50264514))
- Valued contribution to the ecosystem (5 comments): "And that is an amazing contribution to the ecosystem!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888759)) "Excited to see libghostty enabling projects like this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47464668)) "libghostty is brilliant and I'm very glad it exists" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50269187))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [ghostty-web](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghostty-web.md): 13 recommend
- [libghostty-vt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/libghostty-vt.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "libghostty", https://hackerapproved.com/p/libghostty/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).