Exporting platform-specific widgets from libghostty #4881
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I think it makes the most sense to eventually transition the GTK apprt to using |
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Would you see the GTK apprt transitioning to a C application rather than a Zig application? If it remains a Zig application we'd use a Ghostty Zig module rather than going through |
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Good point, yes the ghostty zig module indeed. |
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One thing that is great about VTE is that it provides a GTK widget, so it's easier to create terminal applications because a lot of the boilerplate is already done. I think Ghostty could supplant some or most usage of VTE by making it easy for application developers to embed a terminal widget.
Extrapolating this further, providing the same for Qt/Mac would have the same benefit.
If we think about the goal of libghostty, it's to (my analysis) provide a great embedded terminal experience for application authors, hence why the MIT license was chosen. If we can lower the barrier to integrating libghostty into an application, we can hopefully share the benefits with more users and tui developers.
The first question that is important to ask is: do we want to do this? If that answer is yes, then we need to discuss how to expose this to users:
Should we expect the relevant communities to provide libghostty-gtk, etc, or should the upstream project take control here? There are a large number of GUI toolkits available that would also benefit from having a libghostty widget available. How do you pick and choose which get upstreamed widgets vs relying on relevant communities? For instance, System76 has bought into iced for COSMIC. Currently, their terminal application embeds alacritty, but maybe it could use a future ghostty crate instead.
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