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Ghostling

78 points by bjornroberg 3 hours ago

10 Comments
I use libghostty for Trolley[0], which packages TUIs as desktop apps, like Electron does for web apps.
It really is quite an amazing piece of software. I just wrapped it in a useful GUI and a bundle/package CLI and it just works. Even on Windows. Kudos to the Ghostty developers.
[0] https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley

By oDot 2 hours ago
I think your github readme is really missing a picture/screenshot to quickly understand what is the experience like. I.e. if your app is mainly about adding the chrome (as in the surrounding UI pixels) around the TUI, then it would be good to show what is the chrome like.

By nout 2 hours ago
The C file is small enough to read (over a few minutes.)
I got to about line 5 and realized: I’ve never seen quite that technique for embedding a font via an autogenerated header before. I’m more used to Windows resources; this seems to generate a byte array in CMake code. I’m somewhere between horrified and impressed, in that I feel we’ve finally discovered a cross platform binary resource embedding solution.

By vintagedave 2 hours ago

Here's the build script that uses: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling/blob/main/bin2heade...

I ran it against a 1x1 pixel GIF:

  cmake -DINPUT=pixel.gif -DOUTPUT=pixel.h -DARRAY_NAME=pixel_gif -P bin2header.cmake

And got this:

  // Auto-generated from /private/tmp/exp/pixel.gif — do not edit.
  static const unsigned char pixel_gif[] = {
      0x47, 0x49, 0x46, 0x38, 0x39, 0x61, 0x01, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x80, 0x00, 
      0x00, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x2c, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 
      0x01, 0x00, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x02, 0x44, 0x01, 0x00, 0x3b
  };

By simonw 2 hours ago

Fun fact: XPM bitmaps were designed to be #included unmodified, the files contain C boilerplate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap

By fresh_broccoli 2 hours ago
You can use `xxd` from the vim package to generate these. You'll find out pretty quickly that this is only suitable for small resources: gcc and clang blow up in both time and space on very large literal arrays. If you need to ship more than a few megabytes, find a different technique.
I used this technique for awhile, but it was too problematic for my use case. Now, I use https://github.com/lief-project/LIEF -- among other things, this project can modify Windows PE, macOS Mach-O, and Linux ELF binaries to add resources to them, then offers an API to read them back later. It's a little different for each format, but it's capable of doing all three and I was able to build a cross-platform resource-bundling system that doesn't care how big the resources are.

By electroly an hour ago
> I’m somewhere between horrified and impressed, in that I feel we’ve finally discovered a cross platform binary resource embedding solution.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment about having "finally discovered" that...
For to me embedding binary resources in source files is nothing new at all? It was definitely done in the early JavaScript days for a variety of reasons.
Arguably early basic listings that had lots of DATA text lines were already doing that. Maybe not the most portable but we're talking about the 70s and 80s here and definitely binary data in source code.
Games for the Atari ST and Amiga, for example, could partially share at least some of their source code and it wasn't uncommon to encode binary inside sources, including... Fonts! Back then fonts were not reused from one game to another.
Heck, I've done in Java (and Java is cross platform) in the past: quick visual debug tools for Java GUI apps to toggle a debug mode showing something not dissimilar to a HUD. Pixel-perfect fonts encoded in .java source files.
I really don't think it's anything new.
P.S: I'm pretty sure it's done like for some fonts in the Linux kernel too.

By TacticalCoder 7 minutes ago
And as a Windows programmer the use of a method called DrawTextEx surprised me :)
A really neat sample. Shows the power of the ghosttty library very well. The author chose well with their other libraries, it’s the kind of demo that lets the code actually demo what to trying to without much else getting in the way. Rather inspirational to wrote my own terminal app now.

By vintagedave 2 hours ago
For cross-compilation ease it makes sense if you don't care about the size explosion.

By kingforaday 2 hours ago
This looks interesting.
I don't need my terminal emulator to support tabs, windows, or session management. My WM manages tabs and windows, and I use tmux for sessions, which also gives me a scrollback buffer, selection, clipboard, search, etc. This combination allows me to use any simple terminal emulator, such as urxvt, st, and now foot, without issues.
Ghostty didn't appeal to me, but I might give this a try. It's good that OSC support is planned. A plugin-like system, similar to st's but less cumbersome, would be nice to have.

By imiric 2 hours ago