libghostty-vt is a C library which implements a modern terminal emulator, extracted from the Ghostty terminal emulator.

libghostty-vt contains the logic for handling the core parts of a terminal emulator: parsing terminal escape sequences, maintaining terminal state, encoding input events, etc. It can handle scrollback, line wrapping, reflow on resize, and more.

Warning: This library is currently in development and the API is not yet stable. Breaking changes are expected in future versions. Use with caution in production code.

API Reference

The API is organized into the following groups:

Terminal - Complete terminal emulator state and rendering
Render State - Incremental render state updates for custom renderers
Formatter - Format terminal content as plain text, VT sequences, or HTML
Terminal Snapshot - Encode and incrementally restore terminal state
Search - Search terminal contents, including scrollback
OSC Parser - Parse OSC (Operating System Command) sequences
SGR Parser - Parse SGR (Select Graphic Rendition) sequences
Paste - Paste into a terminal, validate and encode paste data
Unicode Utilities - Codepoint properties for text layout
Build Info - Query compile-time build configuration
Memory Management - Memory management and custom allocators
Byte-stream I/O - Reusable synchronous reader and writer callbacks
WebAssembly Utilities - WebAssembly convenience functions

Encoding related APIs:

Focus Encoding - Encode focus in/out events into terminal sequences
Key Encoding - Encode key events into terminal sequences
Mouse Encoding - Encode mouse events into terminal sequences

Examples

Complete working examples:

c-vt-build-info/src/main.c - Build info query example
c-vt/src/main.c - OSC parser example
c-vt-encode-key/src/main.c - Key encoding example
c-vt-encode-mouse/src/main.c - Mouse encoding example
c-vt-paste/src/main.c - Paste example
c-vt-sgr/src/main.c - SGR parser example
c-vt-formatter/src/main.c - Terminal formatter example
c-vt-grid-traverse/src/main.c - Grid traversal example using grid refs
c-vt-grid-ref-tracked/src/main.c - Tracked grid ref example
c-vt-compression/src/main.c - Idle scrollback compression example
c-vt-search/src/main.c - Terminal search example