Getting started

Macterm vs. Ghostty

Macterm is not a fork of Ghostty and not a reimplementation of it. It links libghostty — the terminal library Ghostty itself is built from — and wraps it in its own macOS app.

The terminal is Ghostty's. The workspace around it is Macterm's.

What comes from libghostty

GPU rendering, escape-sequence handling, scrollback and reflow, font shaping, and key encoding. A TUI that draws correctly in Ghostty draws correctly in Macterm, because it is the same code drawing it.

What Macterm adds

• A vertical project sidebar — work grouped into projects, each with its own tabs, instead of one horizontal tab strip.
• Session persistence — quitting detaches your shells rather than killing them.
• Remote projects — a project whose directory lives on another machine, with panes that persist on the host.
• Pinned tabs, declarative layouts, and a control CLI.

Your config carries over

Macterm reads your existing Ghostty config from the same locations Ghostty does — theme, font, palette, keybinds, even a custom app icon (macos-icon = custom). Nothing is copied or converted; it is the same file.

A short list of keys is overridden, all of them window chrome Macterm draws itself. Configuration lists them.

Which should I use?

Ghostty if you want the terminal on its own: mature, cross-platform, maintained by its author, and with no opinion about how you organize your work.

Macterm if you are on macOS and what you keep fighting is session management — shells that survive quitting, projects instead of tabs, and a directory on a server treated like a directory on your Mac.

Running both is fine. They share the config file, and their sessions are independent.

The library Macterm links is ghostty-internal, which upstream does not support for external use. Macterm pins one specific build of it rather than tracking upstream, and its maintainers owe it no stability promise — so bugs in the terminal itself belong here, not in Ghostty's tracker.