Wintty

A native Windows terminal emulator on the Ghostty core.
A DirectX 12 (GPU) renderer and a WinUI 3 shell on libghostty, the Zig emulation core proven by Ghostty.
Download · Documentation · Build from source · Contributing · Developing

Get Wintty

Sponsored build (recommended). Sponsor any amount to unlock the signed installer with automatic in-app updates, then sign in with GitHub and download it. You get both stable and tip channels and the sponsors-only Discord channel; Pro adds more (tiers).

The OSS and the Sponsor versions require Windows 11, x64, and a DirectX 12 feature-level-12.0 GPU. These builds have no software fallback, so VMs without GPU passthrough and Remote Desktop sessions will not start them.

The Pro Legacy tier exists for exactly those boxes, shipping a DirectX 11 renderer whose WARP software rasterizer engages automatically on no-GPU systems and in remote sessions. SmartScreen may show "Windows protected your PC" on first run of a newly published build (choose More info, then Run anyway).

IMPORTANT: Do NOT trust installers and/or binaries that are not sourced from https://wintty.io/download and are not digitally signed.

Build from source (free, always)

Clone, just, done:

git clone https://github.com/deblasis/wintty && cd wintty
just              # tests + build the DLL
just build-win    # the app

Prerequisites: Zig 0.16 or newer (floor set by minimum_zig_version in build.zig.zon), Just, PowerShell 7, and the .NET 10 SDK (version pinned in global.json). just build-win is a Windows-only recipe. Why Just, and how merges are gated: windows/docs/tooling.md.

[!WARNING] Development moves fast, and there is no always-on hosted CI on this branch: merges are gated on a green local just signoff run against the exact commit, so the occasional bad commit can land between batches. For a calmer ride, build a tagged source snapshot instead of the branch tip (browse tags on the releases page).

[!IMPORTANT]

An independent soft fork of Ghostty

🍬🍴

Wintty is an independent project, not affiliated with the Ghostty project or Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a soft fork focused on bringing Ghostty to Windows built with passion by a long time Windows user (3.11): the windows branch is the default and is rebased on upstream main as often as possible. About 20 of this fork's build and CI PRs were merged upstream before the project continued here, and since upstream is not planning Windows at the time of writing, this is where Windows lives I guess.

What you get

• Real terminal emulation on the Zig core Ghostty ships, Kitty graphics protocol included
• A native WinUI 3 shell: vertical tabs, splits, quick terminal, command palette, full settings UI, profiles with shell auto-discovery, session restore
• Windows integration: Mica / Acrylic / Crystal backdrops, toast notifications, jump lists, taskbar progress, High Contrast support, single instance
• Shell support out of the box: pwsh, cmd, WSL distros, MSYS2
• A thin C# layer over ghostty.dll via P/Invoke, same architecture as macOS where Swift wraps the same core

The full per-tier feature matrix: Wintty tiers and features.

Architecture in one paragraph

libghostty keeps all terminal emulation in Zig. The Windows app wraps it in C# (WinUI 3) for windowing, input, and platform integration. The DX12 renderer supports three surface modes at the library level, HWND, SwapChainPanel (composition), and shared texture, so embedders pick whichever fits their host. No compile-time flags; the device picks the path from what the caller provides. Note that upstream's libghostty C API is still young and unversioned, so embedders should expect some churn. .NET examples live in libghostty-dotnet.

Roadmap

The full issue tracker is the real roadmap.

Sponsors

To everyone who has kindly sponsored this work: THANK YOU. 🙏 You are why this ships. Join them or reach out.

Crash reports

Wintty captures crashes locally and never sends anything anywhere on its own. If you hit a crash and want it fixed, open an issue; the app can also produce a support dump that you can review in full before choosing to send it. Details in the privacy notice.

License

MIT, inherited from Ghostty. See LICENSE. The sponsored binaries are a convenience, not a license change: the source builds the same thing.

Upstream

Wintty is built on Ghostty by Mitchell Hashimoto and contributors. All credit for the terminal emulation core, and much of the speed, is theirs. Anything not Windows-specific (macOS, Linux/GTK, the full libghostty story) lives upstream: ghostty.org/docs.