This document describes the process of contributing to Ghostty. It is intended for anyone considering opening an issue, discussion or pull request. For people who are interested in developing Ghostty and technical details behind it, please check out our "Developing Ghostty" document as well.
Note
I'm sorry for the wall of text. I'm not trying to be difficult and I do appreciate your contributions. Ghostty is a personal project for me that I maintain in my free time. If you're expecting me to dedicate my personal time to fixing bugs, maintaining features, and reviewing code, I do kindly ask you spend a few minutes reading this document. Thank you. ❤️
The most important rule: you must understand your code. If you can't explain what your changes do and how they interact with the greater system without the aid of AI tools, do not contribute to this project.
Using AI to write code is fine. You can gain understanding by interrogating an agent with access to the codebase until you grasp all edge cases and effects of your changes. What's not fine is submitting agent-generated slop without that understanding. Be sure to read the AI Usage Policy.
The Ghostty project has strict rules for AI usage. Please see the AI Usage Policy. This is very important.
We use a vouch system for first-time contributors:
- Open a discussion in the "Vouch Request" category describing what you want to change and why. Follow the template.
- Keep it concise
- Write in your own voice, don't have an AI write this
- A maintainer will comment
!vouchif approved - Once approved, you can submit PRs
If you aren't vouched, any pull requests you open will be automatically closed. This system exists because open source works on a system of trust, and AI has unfortunately made it so we can no longer trust-by-default because it makes it too trivial to generate plausible-looking but actually low-quality contributions.
If you contributed to Ghostty prior to the introduction of the vouch system and wish to continue contributing, you were not automatically added to the list of vouched users. You will need to follow the same process as a first-time contributor to be vouched.
If you repeatedly break the rules of this document or repeatedly submit low quality work, you will be denounced. This adds your username to a public list of bad actors who have wasted our time. All future interactions on this project will be automatically closed by bots.
The denouncement list is public, so other projects who trust our maintainer judgement can also block you automatically.
All issues are actionable. Pick one and start working on it. Thank you. If you need help or guidance, comment on the issue. Issues that are extra friendly to new contributors are tagged with "contributor friendly".
We have written a Translator's Guide for everyone interested in contributing translations to Ghostty. Translations usually do not need to go through the process of issue triage and you can submit pull requests directly, although please make sure that our Style Guide is followed before submission.
First, search the issue tracker and discussions for similar issues. Tip: also search for closed issues and discussions — your issue might have already been fixed!
Note
If there is an open issue or discussion that matches your problem, please do not comment on it unless you have valuable insight to add.
GitHub has a very noisy set of default notification settings which sends an email to every participant in an issue/discussion every time someone adds a comment. Instead, use the handy upvote button for discussions, and/or emoji reactions on both discussions and issues, which are a visible yet non-disruptive way to show your support.
If your issue hasn't been reported already, open an "Issue Triage" discussion and make sure to fill in the template completely. They are vital for maintainers to figure out important details about your setup.
Warning
A very common mistake is to file a bug report either as a Q&A or a Feature Request. Please don't do this. Otherwise, maintainers would have to ask for your system information again manually, and sometimes they will even ask you to create a new discussion because of how few detailed information is required for other discussion types compared to Issue Triage.
Because of this, please make sure that you only use the "Issue Triage" category for reporting bugs — thank you!
Like bug reports, first search through both issues and discussions and try to find if your feature has already been requested. Otherwise, open a discussion in the "Feature Requests, Ideas" category.
- If there is an issue for the feature, open a pull request straight away.
- If there is no issue, open a discussion and link to your branch.
- If you want to live dangerously, open a pull request and hope for the best.
Open an Q&A discussion, or join our Discord Server and ask away in the
#help forum channel.
Do not use the #terminals or #development channels to ask for help —
those are for general discussion about terminals and Ghostty development
respectively. If you do ask a question there, you will be redirected to
#help instead.
Note
If your question is about a missing feature, please open a discussion under the "Feature Requests, Ideas" category. If Ghostty is behaving unexpectedly, use the "Issue Triage" category.
The "Q&A" category is strictly for other kinds of discussions and do not require detailed information unlike the two other categories, meaning that maintainers would have to spend the extra effort to ask for basic information if you submit a bug report under this category.
Therefore, please pay attention to the category before opening discussions to save us all some time and energy. Thank you!
The Ghostty issue tracker is for actionable items.
Unlike some other projects, Ghostty does not use the issue tracker for discussion or feature requests. Instead, we use GitHub discussions for that. Once a discussion reaches a point where a well-understood, actionable item is identified, it is moved to the issue tracker. This pattern makes it easier for maintainers or contributors to find issues to work on since every issue is ready to be worked on.
If you are experiencing a bug and have clear steps to reproduce it, please open an issue. If you are experiencing a bug but you are not sure how to reproduce it or aren't sure if it's a bug, please open a discussion. If you have an idea for a feature, please open a discussion.
Pull requests should be associated with a previously accepted issue. If you open a pull request for something that wasn't previously discussed, it may be closed or remain stale for an indefinite period of time. I'm not saying it will never be accepted, but the odds are stacked against you.
Issues tagged with "feature" represent accepted, well-scoped feature requests. If you implement an issue tagged with feature as described in the issue, your pull request will be accepted with a high degree of certainty.
Note
Pull requests are NOT a place to discuss feature design. Please do not open a WIP pull request to discuss a feature. Instead, use a discussion and link to your branch.