Building a Shell for ghostty

[Cluster444]

So I've been working on building a shell in Zig and looking to leverage ghostty. I've got basic command handling working, and working my way through the basic builtins, aliasing, expansions and so on. My goal is to get get it to being my daily driver, and then start expanding some features I have in mind.

My hangup at the moment is getting TUI apps to run. I've done a couple of TUIs myself and my understanding was they talk to the terminal directly after setting the flags to raw and flipping to the alternate screen. But apparently there's more the parent proc has to do first.

My question for @mitchellh - is this what libghostty is looking to solve? Is there code in ghostty already for handling this, or is the shell layer different from what the terminal needs to do to launch a TUI?

[rhodes-b]

libghosty is mean to be used as a core for other terminal emulator applications similar to VTE.
Ie a terminal in the browser, or embedded into a text editor / ide like vscode

I dont think libghostty is doing to do what you are asking. If you are having issues getting a tui app to run I wouldnt expected ghostty to respond any different to launching a tui compared to other terminals

One thing that may help you though is the terminal inspector feature so you can see what your shell is sending to the terminal to see if there is any conflict from the standard

[Cluster444]

How does the terminal inspector work? I don't see it referenced in the docs.

[rhodes-b]

It shows quite a bit of detail about the state and events of the terminal you can open it with either the hamburger icon and the dropdown will have "Terminal Inspector" I believe mac also has a way to see it from some menu but im not sure. It also shows up on right click menu on linux. Or you can use the default keybind to open and close it ctrl+shift+i (its a toggle so open and close on the same keybind)

[Cluster444]

Ok, that's pretty cool. On Mac it has Opt+Cmd+I

That helps a ton, and I solve my issue, was to do with handling the stdin/stdout. Zig's default proc.Child spawner seems more meant for doing things like foo = system("cat file.txt") types of commands. Setting it from .Pipe mode to .Inherit mode did the trick!