Ghostties
A native macOS terminal with a multi-agent sidebar, built as a minimal, open-source fork of Ghostty. It puts a row of agent sessions next to the terminal you already work in, so you can glance at what's running, click in, and stay in flow.
hen work runs in parallel, the hard part is knowing what actually needs your attention. Running coding agents makes that vivid: I'm usually 2 to 7 sessions across projects in Claude Code, and the standard setup is ten sessions, ten terminal tabs, ten context switches. The heavyweight agentic IDEs that promise to fix this bog the laptop down, trading one kind of friction for another. I didn't want a heavy app sitting on top of work that was happening in the terminal anyway.
I didn't build a new IDE. I leaned on the terminal I was already living in. Ghostties is a minimal fork of Ghostty, the fast, native, open-source terminal written in Zig and Swift by Mitchell Hashimoto, with a SwiftUI sidebar added for running agents in parallel. Keeping the fork minimal was the whole design: only two upstream files are touched, so Ghostty stays Ghostty and I'm not fighting its creator's work, just adding a workspace layer on top of it. Restraint was the right shape for the fix.
“I'm a designer, and I live in the terminal now.”
The build
A small set of deliberate pieces, each one earning its place.
The sidebar
A project rail down the side holds every project, and each project opens into its sessions and six task zones: Inbox, Backlog, Running, Needs You, Review, and Graveyard. The work organizes itself by where it is, not by which tab it's buried in.
The ghosts
Each project gets a unique pixel-art ghost, twenty-four in all, shown in the icon rail. The ghosts are a visual handle for tracking which session is which, not a mascot or an assistant. Terracotta (#C97350) is reserved for the one state that needs your eyes: waiting, needs you.
Status everywhere
The same status lives in two places: the sidebar and a menu bar item. So you can see what's waiting on you without the terminal window even being focused.
The task layer
Tasks are plain Markdown files on disk, and three surfaces read and write the same files: the sidebar, a gt CLI, and an MCP server that agents push PR, branch, and exit state back into. One source of truth, three ways in.
The minimal fork
Only two upstream Ghostty files are modified (TerminalController.swift and AppDelegate.swift). Everything else lives in its own feature folder. That restraint is structural: Ghostty ships roughly every six months, and a fork this thin stays mergeable instead of drifting away from the project it's built on.
01Daily driver first
I built Ghostties for myself, and it ships OTA to the machine I work on every day. It graduates to a real product if it keeps working for me, not before. That order keeps it honest.
02Restraint as a feature
The easy version of this is a big new app that owns your whole workflow. The harder, better version touches two files and gets out of the way. The ghost characters bring the personality; the interface doesn't need to.
03Designing for agent-assisted development
This is a tool shaped around how work actually happens now: many agents at once, each at a different stage, most of them waiting on a human. The design problem was making "what needs me" legible at a glance, and that's a design problem, not just an engineering one.
04Player-coach
I lead from inside the work, not above it. I have led teams of people, and Ghostties is the same instinct pointed at agents: in the game as much as leading the game. I built a tool for orchestrating agents by orchestrating agents to build it. I decided what the product needed, then directed agents across the whole ship (product, design, build) and composed open-source and protocol pieces to get there. Ghostty for the terminal, MCP for agent integration, Sparkle for delivery, each chosen so I started from leverage instead of zero. A leader who builds and ships, with humans and with agents.
Ghostties is open source under MIT, the same license as upstream Ghostty, and it ships via OTA auto-updates to ghostties.org. It's macOS only. It's still early: v0.1.0-beta.18, built over about four months from February to June 2026. There's a lot here, and a lot of room ahead.
About four months (Feb to June 2026)