I was a Ghostty user but kept running into the same problem: too many tabs, no way to organize them. Ghostty doesn't have tab groups or a plugin system, so I built Calyx using libghostty as the rendering engine.
The idea is simple — keep Ghostty's speed, but add the workflow features I was missing:
- Tab Groups — color-coded, collapsible groups to organize tabs by project
- Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P) — search and run any action
- Session Persistence — tabs, splits, and working directories survive restarts
- Notification Badges — OSC 9/99/777 notifications with per-tab badge counts
- Built-in Browser — open docs right next to your terminal
- Terminal Search (Cmd+F) — find text in terminal output
- Git Diff View — inline source control diffs
- IPC MCP Server — programmatic control from tools like Claude Code (Demo: https://youtu.be/LHY-NJEqBTg)
- Scrollbar, cursor-click-to-move, Liquid Glass UI throughout
Hi, thank you for asking. Honestly, I didn't know about tmux when I started this project. I was only familiar with Ghostty and cmux, and I really wanted a translucent terminal with Liquid Glass. Plus, building my own means I can customize it however I want going forward. So I just went for it.
Hi, thanks for the feedback! To clarify, I do use the built-in .glassEffect() modifier on SwiftUI components (sidebar, tab bar, command palette, browser toolbar). The terminal surface itself is the hard part. It's backed by ghostty's Metal renderer which draws its own opaque background, so simply slapping .glassEffect() on it doesn't work. I've been working on improving transparency there but it's not as simple as a few lines of code when you're wrapping a GPU-rendered terminal engine. The titlebar is intentional for now, but I'm considering options there.
Forgive me if I got it wrong but isn’t the chrome supposed to be taken care by the OS (Liguid Glass in this case) and Ghostty to just behave as Ghostty?
If I use Calyx but I have set up macOS to be non liquid glassy as much as possible with Accessibility features, etc. will Calyx just be GHostty?
Good question! The OS handles Liquid Glass automatically for standard UI elements (title bars, sidebars, toolbars). I use .glassEffect() on those parts. But the terminal content area is a custom Metal-rendered surface from ghostty, so the OS can't automatically apply glass to it.
On the accessibility point, if you disable transparency effects, the glass parts will respect that. But Calyx won't just become Ghostty. The features beyond glass (tab groups, command palette, session persistence, notifications, browser tabs, git viewer, etc.) are all still there. Glass is the visual layer, not the core of what Calyx adds.
I moved from iTerm2 to ghosttty / wezterm (for a bit). Moved due to the AI inclusions (despite them being moved). I've had no issues, in fact, I prefer ghostty to iTerm2 now.
I moved to ghostty from iterm2 more than a year ago. At first, I thought I will be missing the iterm2’s flexibility and config options, yet in reality, I never even looked back.
Ugh that screenshot. I really hate transparent terminals. I can live with slight transparency and a pretty low detail background but this would be so hard to read.
This doesn't make me want to use it. I'm not on Mac anyway but still.
I just use Konsole at the moment, sometimes kitty if I need something really low resource.
Readit News
I was a Ghostty user but kept running into the same problem: too many tabs, no way to organize them. Ghostty doesn't have tab groups or a plugin system, so I built Calyx using libghostty as the rendering engine.
The idea is simple — keep Ghostty's speed, but add the workflow features I was missing:
Happy to answer any questions.As far as I can tell, this doesn't use it.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/SwiftUI/Applying-L...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologyoverview...
Also, for the vibe that this is going for, very surprised the title bar was left in.
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Code has lots of claims that something is done and it isn't.
Besides that, I think readability could be an issue.
If I use Calyx but I have set up macOS to be non liquid glassy as much as possible with Accessibility features, etc. will Calyx just be GHostty?
On the accessibility point, if you disable transparency effects, the glass parts will respect that. But Calyx won't just become Ghostty. The features beyond glass (tab groups, command palette, session persistence, notifications, browser tabs, git viewer, etc.) are all still there. Glass is the visual layer, not the core of what Calyx adds.
This doesn't make me want to use it. I'm not on Mac anyway but still.
I just use Konsole at the moment, sometimes kitty if I need something really low resource.