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
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+{
+  description = "Vertical-tab terminal built on libghostty-vt";
+
+  inputs = {
+    # Ghostty tracks nixpkgs-unstable to get GTK 4.20 / GNOME 49. We follow
+    # suit so that our zig-gobject bindings (shared with Ghostty) match the
+    # GObject introspection data of the GTK we link against.
+    nixpkgs.url = "https://channels.nixos.org/nixpkgs-unstable/nixexprs.tar.xz";
+
+    flake-compat = {
+      url = "github:edolstra/flake-compat";
+      flake = false;
+    };
+
+    systems = {
+      url = "github:nix-systems/default";
+      flake = false;
+    };
+
+    # Zig 0.16.0 is not in nixpkgs yet; libghostty-vt requires it.
+    zig = {
+      url = "github:mitchellh/zig-overlay";
+      inputs = {
+        nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
+        flake-compat.follows = "flake-compat";
+        systems.follows = "systems";
+      };
+    };
+  };
+
+  outputs = {
+    self,
+    nixpkgs,
+    zig,
+    systems,
+    ...
+  }: let
+    inherit (nixpkgs) lib legacyPackages;
+
+    forAllSystems = f:
+      lib.genAttrs (import systems) (system: f legacyPackages.${system} system);
+  in {
+    devShells = forAllSystems (pkgs: system: {
+      default = pkgs.mkShell {
+        name = "vtabs";
+
+        nativeBuildInputs = [
+          zig.packages.${system}."0.16.0"
+          pkgs.pkg-config
+          pkgs.gdb
+
+          # Used by ./shot.sh to run the app inside a throwaway headless
+          # compositor and screenshot it, so UI can be checked without
+          # touching the developer's real session.
+          pkgs.sway
+          pkgs.grim
+          pkgs.wtype
+        ];
+
+        buildInputs = with pkgs; [
+          # GTK4 + libadwaita, the same native UI stack Ghostty uses on Linux.
+          gtk4
+          libadwaita
+          glib
+          gobject-introspection
+          pango
+          cairo
+          harfbuzz
+          gdk-pixbuf
+          graphene
+
+          # Windowing backends GTK links against.
+          wayland
+          libxkbcommon
+          libx11
+
+          # Font stack used by Pango for glyph rasterization.
+          fontconfig
+          freetype
+
+          # Icon themes so the app doesn't render missing-image icons.
+          adwaita-icon-theme
+          hicolor-icon-theme
+        ];
+
+        shellHook = ''
+          # GTK needs to find icon themes and schemas at runtime when the app
+          # is launched straight out of the dev shell rather than installed.
+          export XDG_DATA_DIRS="${pkgs.gtk4}/share/gsettings-schemas/${pkgs.gtk4.name}:${pkgs.adwaita-icon-theme}/share:${pkgs.hicolor-icon-theme}/share:$XDG_DATA_DIRS"
+          export GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR="${pkgs.gtk4}/share/gsettings-schemas/${pkgs.gtk4.name}/glib-2.0/schemas"
+        '';
+      };
+    });
+
+    formatter = forAllSystems (pkgs: _: pkgs.alejandra);
+  };
+}