A terminal component for Compose Multiplatform powered by libghostty-vt.

Composetty combines Ghostty's terminal parser and state model with a Compose renderer and a transport-neutral session API for remote terminals. Desktop applications can additionally use a Pty4J-managed local shell. Consumers do not need to ship a separate Ghostty installation.

[!IMPORTANT] Composetty is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Ghostty project. “Ghostty” is used only to identify the upstream project and library.

Composetty is under initial development and has not been published to Maven Central yet. The first release is planned for Compose Multiplatform on Android, iOS, and JVM desktop. Desktop currently supports macOS and Linux on arm64 and x86-64. The libghostty API is still evolving, so Composetty pins and tests one exact Ghostty revision per release.

Current functionality includes:

• transport-neutral sessions for SSH, WebSocket, and other remote terminal connections
• local PTY-backed shell sessions on desktop
• VT parsing and scrollback through libghostty-vt
• ANSI and true-color rendering
• bold, italic, faint, underline, and strikethrough text
• cursor styles, resizing, keyboard encoding, focus, and scrolling

Software-keyboard input, committed IME text, touch scrolling, complete grapheme clusters, double-width cells, long-press selection, clipboard copy/paste, and an optional mobile keyboard accessory are supported. Selection handles and autoscroll, marked-text rendering during IME composition, hyperlinks, and Kitty images are not implemented yet.

After the first release:

dependencies {
    implementation("dev.befrvnk.composetty:ghostty-compose:<version>")
}

Published artifacts will contain the native libraries. Consumers do not need Nix, Zig, a C compiler, or a locally installed Ghostty application.

Composetty renders a TerminalSession; your application supplies either a TerminalTransport for a remote process or, on JVM desktop, a local PTY session. The terminal composable manages grid measurement, rendering, keyboard input, touch scrolling, selection, and IME text input.

val theme = remember {
    TerminalTheme(
        foreground = TerminalRgb(230, 230, 230),
        background = TerminalRgb(25, 25, 25),
        cursor = TerminalRgb(230, 230, 230),
    )
}
val transport = remember(connection) { connection.asTerminalTransport() }
val session = remember(transport) {
    GhosttyTerminalSessionFactory().create(theme, transport)
}

LaunchedEffect(session, connection) {
    connection.output.collect(session::receive)
}

DisposableEffect(session) {
    onDispose(session::close)
}

Column(Modifier.fillMaxSize()) {
    GhosttyTerminal(
        session = session,
        theme = theme,
        modifier = Modifier.weight(1f),
    )
    TerminalKeyboardAccessory(session)
}

TerminalKeyboardAccessory is optional. It provides Escape, Tab, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-D, arrow, Copy, and Paste buttons for software keyboards.

See the integration guide for the transport contract, remote and local-session examples, lifecycle ownership, theming, input behavior, and platform support.

The Android sample in samples/android uses the asynchronous loopback transport from samples/remote to exercise the software keyboard, selection, clipboard actions, accessory keys, and touch scrollback without requiring an SSH server. Run the same loopback transport as a JVM desktop application with devenv shell -- ./gradlew :samples:remote:run.

The SwiftUI application in samples/ios exercises the same functionality through an embedded Compose framework. The standalone build in samples/consumer resolves only the published Maven artifacts and verifies JVM native loading, Android APK native packaging, and iOS device/simulator linking. Build the Android sample with gw :samples:android:assembleDebug; see samples/ios/README.md for the Xcode workflow.

Nix owns the native build and devenv owns the development environment.

# Enter the complete environment and realize the host native bridge
devenv shell

# Kotlin, native integration, and ABI compatibility tests
gw check

# Publish to an isolated repository and test a standalone KMP consumer
gw consumerSmokeTest

# Generate the API documentation published in documentation JARs
gw dokkaGenerate

# Build native outputs
devenv build outputs.native
devenv build outputs.androidNative
devenv build outputs.iosNative

# Assemble the Android AAR, device-test APK, and interactive sample
gw assemble assembleAndroidTest :samples:android:assembleDebug

# On x86-64 Linux with KVM, accept the Android SDK license for this Nix build,
# then run device tests against the packaged x86-64 library
export NIXPKGS_ACCEPT_ANDROID_SDK_LICENSE=1
runner="$(devenv build -q outputs.androidX86Test | sed -n 's/.*: "\(.*\)"/\1/p')"
"$runner/bin/composetty-android-x86-test"

Reference ABI declarations are stored in api/. The regular check task rejects incompatible or unreviewed public API changes; run gw updateKotlinAbi only after reviewing an intentional API change.

Ghostty is an exact flake input in devenv.yaml and devenv.lock. Its libghostty-vt-releasefast package supplies headers, a static archive, and pkg-config metadata. Composetty's Nix derivation links that package into a narrow platform bridge. Desktop uses a dynamic C ABI loaded through JNA; Android uses a JNI library containing the statically linked Ghostty VT implementation. iOS uses Kotlin/Native cinterop with the bridge and Ghostty embedded as a static library in each published KLIB.

The native output is arranged exactly as the Maven resource layout:

native/ghostty/macos-arm64/libcomposetty-ghostty.dylib
native/ghostty/macos-x86_64/libcomposetty-ghostty.dylib
native/ghostty/linux-arm64/libcomposetty-ghostty.so
native/ghostty/linux-x86_64/libcomposetty-ghostty.so

The Android output is packaged into the AAR from:

jniLibs/arm64-v8a/libcomposetty-ghostty.so
jniLibs/x86_64/libcomposetty-ghostty.so

The iOS output contains device and arm64 simulator archives:

iosArm64/lib/libcomposetty-ghostty.a
iosSimulatorArm64/lib/libcomposetty-ghostty.a

Kotlin/Native 2.4 defaults new iOS binaries to iOS 15. Applications retaining Composetty's iOS 14 minimum must override the final binary's Konan property for each configured target, as demonstrated in samples/ios/build.gradle.kts. Composetty applies the same override to its own published target compilations and verifies the sample framework's MinimumOSVersion.

A full Xcode installation with the iOS device and simulator SDKs is required to build or test the iOS target. devenv selects /Applications/Xcode.app for these tasks. Composetty overrides Kotlin/Native's current default deployment target so the published KLIBs and sample framework retain the documented iOS 14 minimum.

Set COMPOSETTY_GHOSTTY_LIBRARY to an absolute library path to override bundled-resource loading during native development.

The Maven coordinates are:

dev.befrvnk.composetty:ghostty-compose

A release aggregates and tests the desktop outputs, packages both Android ABI libraries, and embeds the iOS device and simulator archives before invoking publishAndReleaseToMavenCentral. The verifyReleaseNativeResources, verifyAndroidNativeResources, and verifyIosNativeResources tasks prevent an incomplete platform set from reaching Maven Central. The canonical Gradle tasks are releasePreflight for an offline signed check and releaseUpload for a user-managed Central deployment; both are usable locally and the latter is also invoked by GitHub Actions. Release versions are derived from signed vVERSION tags and must have a matching CHANGELOG.md section. The protected maven-central GitHub environment resolves Central and in-memory OpenPGP credentials from 1Password, uploads a deployment for manual inspection, and deliberately leaves final publication to a maintainer in the Central Portal. Pushing a signed release tag triggers the same locally runnable Gradle task after approval of the protected GitHub environment. See docs/releasing.md.

Composetty is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. The statically linked Ghostty code is licensed under the MIT License; its copyright and license are included in NOTICE and the published artifacts.