pyghostty

Unofficial (but complete) python bindings for libghostty-vt. libghostty is Ghostty’s embeddable terminal emulation core, a headless, high-fidelity VT emulator for Python. These bindings cover terminal state, screen and scrollback snapshots, kitty graphics, and everything else Ghostty’s production terminal core handles.

The binding is Python-ABI-independent: pure Python (cffi ABI mode) over a bundled libghostty-vt shared library, so one wheel per platform covers every Python version. No compiler is needed at install time.

Usage

from pyghostty import Terminal

with Terminal(cols=80, rows=24) as t:
    t.feed('hello\r\nworld')
    t.cursor      # (x, y), 0-indexed
    t.text()      # plain text of the visible screen only
    t.contents()  # everything: scrollback plus screen, soft-wraps unwrapped
    t.resize(120, 24)  # reflows the primary screen

The base layer, pyghostty._cdef/_ffi, exposes the complete generated C API as raw ffi/lib (regenerate with gen_cdef.py after moving the pinned ghostty rev).

pyghostty.core.Terminal provides an ergonomic wrapper for commonly used parts.

Building the library

The shared library is built from a ghostty checkout with the Zig toolchain (installed via pip as ziglang):

GHOSTTY_SRC=/path/to/ghostty python build_lib.py

The checkout must be at the revision pinned in pyproject.toml. This runs zig build -Demit-lib-vt=true and copies the resulting shared library into pyghostty/_lib/, where the package loader and wheel builds pick it up.

Development

pip install -e .[dev]
GHOSTTY_SRC=/path/to/ghostty python build_lib.py
pytest -q

Versioning

Version lives in pyghostty/__init__.py as __version__.

Releases

Pushing a v* tag runs .github/workflows/release.yml, which builds and tests one Python-ABI-independent wheel for each supported platform and publishes the wheels to GitHub and PyPI. Releases are wheel-only; source remains available from the corresponding GitHub tag.