A terminal UI to set up Ghostty: themes, colours, fonts, window and input options. It edits your existing Ghostty config in place and runs in any terminal, as a palette in the bottom rows of the one you are in.

go install github.com/vitruves/ghostty-config/cmd/ghostty-config@latest

Building needs Go 1.26 (the Go command fetches it by itself if yours is older). The interface is written with Bubble Tea v2.

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/vitruves/ghostty-config.git
cd ghostty-config
make build && make local-install

Run ghostty-config. A card opens in the bottom rows of your terminal: a prompt, six tabs (Themes, Fonts, Window, Input, Session, Tool), a list, and under it an explanation of the highlighted line. Pick a tab with the arrows or the mouse, or type a command's name.

Browsing never changes your config or your terminal. A theme is written only when you press Enter on it, and then the terminal takes its colours at once; a setting is written when you choose its value.

In Ghostty and Kitty the highlighted theme is shown as a picture beside its details, drawn through the Kitty graphics protocol: a card with rounded corners and a soft shadow, a few lines of sample output in its own colours, its sixteen colours as one strip, and how readable it is. The text in the picture is set in Google Sans Code and Google Sans Flex, built into the program (SIL Open Font License, see internal/kimg/fonts), so it looks the same whatever font your terminal uses.

Elsewhere the details are drawn from cells as before. -no-images forces that, -images asks for the picture in a terminal that is not known to draw it, and nothing is drawn as a picture inside tmux or screen. To have the rest of the interface in the same typeface, Download offers Google Sans Code first and Font picks it.

The Collection command installs 252 curated themes in 27 families. Each takes its structure from a named account of colour, so a theme's name tells you the logic behind it: moods (Focus, Calm, Warmth, Energy), historical colour theory (Goethe, Itten, Hering, Kobayashi, Birren, Luscher, Munsell), vision and sleep science (Scotopic, Circadian), and, new in this release, Plutchik's emotion wheel, the harmony rules taught in design schools (analogous, triadic, split-complement, 60-30-10…), Gestalt laws, Albers, Dutch and Swiss modernism, Japanese aesthetics, cognitive psychology (Stroop, Yerkes-Dodson, flow, Von Restorff), Jung's archetypes, Kandinsky and the art movements. Colour–mood links are mostly convention and several of these theories are historical rather than correct; what is checked is legibility: every theme clears WCAG AAA for body text and AA for every ANSI colour, and the test suite enforces it.

-config file            edit this file instead of the default config
-themes dir             user themes directory
-export-collection dir  write the 252 extra themes to a directory and exit
-no-reload              never ask Ghostty to reload
-no-images              never show the highlighted theme as a picture
-images                 show it as a picture even where the terminal is not known to draw it
-plain                  use only glyphs that every terminal can draw
-paths                  print the files that are read and written
-no-update-check        never look for a newer release on GitHub
-version                print the version

The tool reads the same files as Ghostty, in the same order: config and config.ghostty in ~/.config/ghostty/, then on macOS the same names in ~/Library/Application Support/com.mitchellh.ghostty/, then any file included with config-file. A setting is rewritten on the line where it is currently defined. Comments and other lines are left untouched.

Each file is backed up to ~/.config/ghostty-config/backups/ before its first change. Themes you save go to ~/.config/ghostty/themes/.

At most once a day, the tool asks GitHub in the background whether a newer release exists and tells you on exit. It never delays startup, stays silent offline, and downloads nothing. Use -no-update-check to turn it off.

Ghostty has no reload command. On macOS the tool sends the reload shortcut to Ghostty, which requires the Accessibility permission. Elsewhere, reload Ghostty yourself after a change.

Thanks to Mitchell Hashimoto and the contributors of Ghostty for the terminal.

MIT