Building Ghostty on Debian

Ghostty is a new terminal emulator written in Zig that was released just days ago. Whether you enjoy compiling programs yourself like I do, or you want to try it right away on your Debian machine (or any other distro without an official package), here's the tutorial to do it.

What is Ghostty?

Ghostty is a terminal emulator created by Mitchell Hashimoto (you may know him from HashiCorp) as a personal project. The most important points:

It’s native: it’s designed to be built natively for each platform, using Swift and AppKit for macOS and Zig with GTK4 for Linux. This lets it integrate naturally with the operating system’s own features, including keyboard shortcuts, UI and OS-specific characteristics.
Features: it offers features both at the terminal level (like the Kitty graphics protocol, notifications, hyperlinks, etc.) and at the application level: native tabs, split screen and a Quake-style drop-down terminal, etc.
Fast: it aims to be on par with ultra-fast terminals like Alacritty; to pull that off it relies on GPU rendering and the Zig programming language.

ghostty slide

Prerequisites

Since Ghostty is written in Zig, you absolutely need its compiler installed on your machine. The official site recommends using Nix as the official development/build environment, but honestly, installing Zig is very easy, and besides, once it’s there it stays available in case we feel like tinkering with the language later on.

You must use exactly version 0.13 of Zig, otherwise the build will fail. I tried the newest version and it failed…

You can use this link to go to the Zig 0.13 download page, or run this command:

curl -O 'https://ziglang.org/builds/zig-linux-x86_64-0.14.0-dev.2571+01081cc8e.tar.xz'

Once downloaded, extract the tar file and put the binary in a directory that is in your system’s $PATH. In my particular case, I have ~/.local/bin/ in my $PATH, so I’ll use that directory. If you want it available to all users, you can make the symbolic link point to /usr/bin/.

As for the directory where I move the binary: I keep a source code repository inspired by the FreeBSD src tree where I have scripts to maintain and build software from source. That’s a topic for another post, but it’s worth mentioning to clear up any doubts. In your case, you can move the directories wherever you like.

# Extract files
tar -xvf zig-linux-x86_64-0.14.0-dev.2569+30169d1d2.tar.xz

# [Optional] Move the extracted files
mv zig-linux-x86_64-0.14.0-dev.2569+30169d1d2.tar.xz ~/jsr/zig/src

# Make a symbolic link of the binary
ln -s "$HOME/jsr/zig/src/zig" ~/.local/bin/zig

In this guide I use symbolic links a lot because we get the advantage that, once everything is installed, updating Ghostty is just a pull of the repository and a rebuild, and everything gets updated at the same time.

There aren’t really many more requirements to install. If you’re using another distro, you can check the additional requirements on the official page. For Debian, simply running the following command is enough.

sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev git

Now all that’s left is downloading the repo:

git clone https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty.git

Building

At this point, compiling Ghostty should be pretty straightforward. Just move into the source directory and build

# Move into the directory with the source
cd ghostty

# Build
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

Depending on your machine’s specs (CPU, RAM, etc.), it can take a few seconds or several minutes. Once the process is finished, you’ll find the binaries in the zig-out/bin/ghostty directory. It’s also worth knowing there’s a directory called dist that will be important in the next step. For now, the structure looks like this:

ghostty
├── dist
│  ├── linux
│  ├── macos
│  └── windows
…
└── zig-out
   ├── bin
   └── share

Installation

If everything worked correctly, all that’s left is the installation: linking the binary to a directory inside your system’s $PATH and moving the dist/linux/*.desktop files so you can see the icons and it shows up in your distro’s launcher.

# Install Ghostty
ln -s "$HOME/jsr/ghostty/src/zig-out/bin/ghostty" ~/.local/bin

# Install the desktop files
ln -s "$HOME/jsr/ghostty/src/dist/linux/ghostty.desktop" ~/.local/share/applications
ln -s "$HOME/jsr/ghostty/src/dist/linux/ghostty_dolphin.desktop" ~/.local/share/applications

Finally, to configure the terminal you need to create the configuration file, and it’s as simple as running the following

# Create the directory if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p ~/.config/ghostty/

# Create the configuration file if it doesn't exist
touch ~/.config/ghostty/config

Once that’s done, configure Ghostty to your liking. Here’s the documentation with all the available options.

Demo and configuration

I’ll leave a few videos so you can see what this new terminal is about and how to configure it. And that’s all — happy hacking!

Ghostty Overview

Ghostty Install and Config

My configuration

font-family = JetBrainsMono NF Medium
font-family-italic = JetBrainsMono NF Medium Italic
font-family-bold = JetBrainsMono NF Bold
font-family-bold-italic = JetBrainsMono NF Bold Italic
font-size = 10.2
theme = tokyonight
adjust-cell-height = 6
window-padding-x = 0
window-padding-y = 0
window-decoration = false
adjust-cursor-thickness = 2
adjust-cursor-height = 6
cursor-color = #00C2FF

ghostty config