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How I Built a Windows Version of Ghostty in 3 Days with AI

Lugiax says a Windows Ghostty fork reached its first release after a three-day feature sprint. The account details the Rust shell around Ghostty’s Zig core, tricky Windows IME and resize behavior, and why AI-generated tests must prove they ran.
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Lugiax says a first version of a Windows Ghostty fork was ready on September 4, 2026, after feature work that began on September 1. The three-day sprint did not produce an official Ghostty Windows app: it produced a personal fork with a Windows-specific Rust shell around Ghostty’s existing Zig core. In the author’s account, the hardest lessons came from Windows input methods, resize-dependent rendering, and proving that tests had actually run.

What “built in 3 days” means

In a DEV Community article published September 23, 2026, Lugiax describes beginning work at 2:30 a.m. on September 1 and releasing a first version on September 4. The author says the feature sprint took three days, followed by more than a week of cleanup and testing. The headline is therefore about a fast initial implementation, not a claim that a finished, independently validated product was built and polished in three days.

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Lugiax’s opening summary reports 45 Windows files, 48,000 lines of Rust, and 246 changes. The article later reports 61 Python checkpoint scripts, four AI agents and 139 updates, and 63 of 72 core actions implemented at the first release. These are the author’s project-specific figures, not independently audited measurements. Lugiax’s account

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How the Windows port was structured

Keep the terminal core; replace the platform shell

Rather than rewrite Ghostty’s terminal engine, Lugiax says the fork retained its existing Zig core and added a Windows-specific shell in Rust. The author reports that the Linux UI was GTK-specific and could not simply serve as the Windows frontend. In this design, the shared core handled terminal functionality while the Rust layer provided Windows integration.

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Lugiax chose Rust in part for Windows COM and Text Services Framework (TSF) input-method integration, and says only about 20 lines of Zig were changed. That is the author’s rationale for this project, not evidence that Rust is the only viable choice for a Windows shell. Implementation details from Lugiax

Test the risky platform feature early

The author deliberately tackled text input early, writing more than 400 lines for input and testing Chinese IME entry. The important distinction is between how text is represented and how much terminal space it occupies: a Unicode character can require more than one byte while displaying in one or two cells. If a terminal calculates display width incorrectly, text may appear misplaced and the IME candidate or composition UI can be positioned incorrectly—even when ordinary English typing looks fine.

That made IME support a useful early risk test. A successful compile could not establish that Windows text composition worked; the input path had to be exercised with the platform behavior the feature depended on. Lugiax’s account of input and rendering issues

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Why resizing exposed a black rendering area

Lugiax’s most striking bug appeared after resizing: the window and image dimensions changed, but the drawable region stayed at its original size, leaving part of the terminal black. The author traced this to the drawable area being set once when the window was created rather than updated on resize.

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In the author’s explanation, GTK refreshed this area for the Linux app, while the Windows implementation used a bare window and needed explicit resize handling. The episode illustrates why porting a rendering core does not automatically port the platform behavior around it. Window lifecycle and drawable-surface updates still need to be implemented and tested for the target environment. Lugiax’s resize-bug account

How the AI-agent workflow was organized

Lugiax describes one AI manager coordinating three or four worker sessions, each assigned a separate area such as input, tabs and splits, rendering, or menus. The manager assigned work and coordinated shared tasks; the human set direction and reviewed decisions. The article reports four AIs and 139 updates across the described workflow.

That arrangement is a case report, not a guarantee that parallel agents will speed up every software project. Its practical logic was to divide work by subsystem while retaining human oversight of architecture and integration. With several workers changing different parts of an application, the overall result still depends on whether their code builds together and behaves correctly on the target platform. Lugiax’s description of the agent workflow

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How to tell whether AI-generated code was actually tested

Make test scripts prove they exercised something

The article describes two misleading success signals. In one command chain, a build step was skipped while a later command returned a success code. Separately, four of 16 generated test scripts checked zero files and still reported success. A green exit status was not enough to show that the intended validation had taken place.

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Lugiax says the scripts were changed to check that they had actually exercised files and to fail if an expected marker was absent. The general engineering lesson is specific: a test harness should verify its own inputs and expected evidence, rather than treating “no error reported” as proof of meaningful coverage. Lugiax’s testing account

Separate “landed” from “verified”

Lugiax distinguishes code that has “landed”—it is written, builds, and passes tests—from code that is “verified”—it has been tested on a real machine with evidence. The author reports remote testing on a real Windows computer, while noting that remote-control input can bypass the normal IME path. The test setup also needed to click the target window before sending keystrokes.

Those details matter because the route used to test a feature must match the route the feature depends on. If a test tool bypasses Windows text composition, it cannot by itself establish that the normal IME path works. Likewise, a keystroke sent before the terminal window has focus says little about how the terminal handles input.

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Lugiax summarizes the caution this way: “When working with AI, the hard work isn’t getting it to write code. The hard work is building a test system so the AI can’t trick you, and can’t trick itself.” —Lugiax, DEV Community

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Is this official Ghostty support for Windows?

No. Lugiax’s project is a personal fork, not an official Ghostty Windows release or endorsement. Ghostty’s official feature page describes native macOS and Linux support and says Windows support is planned for the future. Ghostty 1.3.0 release notes likewise say Microsoft Windows support is still not planned, while noting that libghostty itself supports Windows. A Windows-capable shared library is not the same thing as an official Windows desktop application.

In a September 20, 2026 comment on the upstream Windows-support discussion, Lugiax described the project as a personal fork using Ghostty’s rendering and VT core with a Rust Windows shell, and asked that its issues not be filed against the upstream repository. The article directs bug reports to the fork’s own repository. Ghostty’s feature support page; Ghostty 1.3.0 release notes; Upstream Windows-support discussion; Lugiax’s article

There are also other independent community efforts. For example, shiweis/ghostty-windows describes itself as a fork adding a native Win32 runtime. Its README reports 66 of 66 application actions covered, and its release page lists later releases. That is a separate project and its action count should not be treated as directly comparable to Lugiax’s reported 63 of 72 core actions: the projects’ measures and scopes are not established as equivalent. shiweis/ghostty-windows repository; Its releases

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What this case study shows

  • A fast first implementation can come from reusing an existing core and concentrating new work in a platform-specific shell.
  • Windows-specific behavior—especially IME composition and drawable-surface resizing—needs validation on the platform, not just a successful build.
  • AI-generated test code can report success without checking anything, so checks should assert that they ran and encountered the expected evidence.
  • Parallel agents can divide work by subsystem in this account, but integration and verification remain essential.

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