Libghostty sneak peek

Today’s issue: Stealing ideas from open source for my next company, rem supremacy, and framework mode vs founder mode.

Welcome to #427.

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Libghostty sneak peek

No, this is not me inviting you to an early screening for a new low-budget horror movie (though Weapons was great).

I’m talking about libghostty – a WIP library that will let any application embed its own fully functional, modern, and fast terminal emulator.

Quick background: As you probably guessed, this is another project by Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of the Ghostty terminal emulator and co-founder of HashiCorp.

He first teased the idea for libghostty in a talk two years ago, and on Monday he gave us a roadmap update on how his latest side quest is going – and it looks pretty promising.

Why libghostty? Terminal emulation shows up in way more places than just your terminal app. Multiplexers like tmux and zellij, IDEs like VS Code and JetBrains, and platforms like Vercel and Render all need to parse terminal sequences.

But most implementations are one-off hacks that are “incomplete, buggy, and slow,” according to Mitchell. And since it’s not the core business for these devtools, developers end up wasting a lot of time reinventing the wheel.

libghostty wants to fix that by providing a shared, fast terminal foundation everyone can build on. Here’s how:

• Real terminal core – The first release, libghostty-vt, will extract and package up Ghostty’s proven internals, including Unicode support, Kitty Graphics, SIMD-optimized parsing, and more.

• Highly portable – Thanks to a zero-dependency C API that runs on macOS, Linux, ARM, x86, embedded devices, and eventually the web via Wasm 🙏.

• Easy drop in – IDEs, CI tools, and any other terminal-adjacent programs can just embed it instead of maintaining their own fragile ANSI parsers.

Bottom Line: Most of us probably won’t work with libghostty directly, but it could end up saving thousands of dev hours by making terminals just work.

And once I’m a billionaire, I too pledge to finally start contributing more of my time to open source.

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Sentry just launched AI Code Review (free beta) 👀

So now you can catch bugs before shipping to prod, without having to wait around for days to get a LGTM stamp.

Sentry’s new AI Code Review blends your error + performance data with your code and commit history to give you reviews that are actually helpful:

• Predicts errors – Spots issues and explains how and why to fix them before you merge (see the docs).

• Gives instant PR feedback – Flags typos, formatting, logic issues, and other nits. It’s prompted through a PR comment, so you only get the reviews you want.

• Writes tests for you – Maps your repo and generates runnable unit tests in a separate branch.

Use it for free during the open beta – and see how it can help you ship cleaner code, faster.

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1. TanStack Start v1.0 RC just dropped and nature is rejoicing.

2. Miriam Suzanne wrote about how we don’t have to choose between px and rem for spacing. Hopefully that means that whoever keeps spray-painting rem supremacy on my garage will stop now.

3. Datadog created this frontend testing best practices guide, which shows you how to efficiently create, maintain, and utilize reliable e2e frontend tests using Datadog. [sponsored]

4. Helium is a new (beta), open-source browser with a built-in adblocker that’s privacy-focused. Coincidentally, I’m happy to announce that I just forked it and raised $127 million from a16z.

5. Astro 5.14 comes with new routing tools, support for React 19 actions, and more.

6. GitHub shared their plan for a more secure npm supply chain. Which is cool, because by definition anything would be more secure than the current npm supply chain.

7. CarbonQA provides high-quality QA services for dev teams, so you’ll never have to waste time testing your own app again. Their US-based testers work in your tools, talk with your team on Slack, and let your devs spend their time building real features. [sponsored]

8. Amit Sheen wrote about CSS typed arithmetic, and they promise it’s a lot more exciting than regular old arithmetic.

9. Ryan Toronto wrote about parallel and recursive route rendering, which he recently added to his Twofold framework.

10. React Router just shipped preview support for RSC in Framework Mode. From what I remember, “Framework Mode” is a lot like “Founder Mode” – just with less cocaine and better showering habits.