vtabs: terminal with vertical tabs on libghostty-vt + GTK4

Uses libghostty-vt (the API Ghostty documents for external embedders) for the terminal core. Ghostty's other C API, ghostty.h, exposes a full terminal surface but only supports macOS and iOS platform tags, so it cannot be embedded on Linux. We supply the layers libghostty-vt deliberately leaves out: PTY and process management, a Cairo/Pango cell renderer, and a GTK4/libadwaita UI with a Zen-style vertical tab sidebar. Nix pins the whole toolchain (Zig 0.16 via zig-overlay, GTK 4.22, libadwaita) so no host setup is needed.
2026-08-11 08:36:10 -04:00
commit 738cead680
16 changed files with 2359 additions and 0 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
+const std = @import("std");
+
+pub fn build(b: *std.Build) void {
+    const target = b.standardTargetOptions(.{});
+    const optimize = b.standardOptimizeOption(.{});
+
+    // libghostty-vt provides the terminal emulator core: escape sequence
+    // parsing, screen/scrollback state, and input encoding. Everything above
+    // it (PTY, rendering, windowing) is ours.
+    const ghostty = b.dependency("ghostty", .{
+        .target = target,
+        .optimize = optimize,
+    });
+
+    // GTK4/libadwaita bindings. This is the same generated binding set
+    // Ghostty uses for its Linux apprt, so it matches the GObject
+    // introspection data of the GTK we link against.
+    const gobject = b.dependency("gobject", .{
+        .target = target,
+        .optimize = optimize,
+    });
+
+    const exe = b.addExecutable(.{
+        .name = "vtabs",
+        .root_module = b.createModule(.{
+            .root_source_file = b.path("src/main.zig"),
+            .target = target,
+            .optimize = optimize,
+            .link_libc = true,
+        }),
+    });
+
+    exe.root_module.addImport("ghostty-vt", ghostty.module("ghostty-vt"));
+
+    const gobject_imports = .{
+        .{ "adw", "adw1" },
+        .{ "cairo", "cairo1" },
+        .{ "gdk", "gdk4" },
+        .{ "gio", "gio2" },
+        .{ "glib", "glib2" },
+        .{ "glibunix", "glibunix2" },
+        .{ "gobject", "gobject2" },
+        .{ "gtk", "gtk4" },
+        .{ "pango", "pango1" },
+        .{ "pangocairo", "pangocairo1" },
+    };
+    inline for (gobject_imports) |import| {
+        const name, const module = import;
+        exe.root_module.addImport(name, gobject.module(module));
+    }
+
+    exe.root_module.linkSystemLibrary("gtk4", .{});
+    exe.root_module.linkSystemLibrary("libadwaita-1", .{});
+
+    b.installArtifact(exe);
+
+    const run_cmd = b.addRunArtifact(exe);
+    run_cmd.step.dependOn(b.getInstallStep());
+    if (b.args) |args| run_cmd.addArgs(args);
+    b.step("run", "Run the app").dependOn(&run_cmd.step);
+}