About Kytos

Kytos (κύτος — Greek for hollow vessel) is a terminal emulator for macOS that combines Ghostty's world-class rendering engine with an IDE-quality shell built on KelyphosKit.

Motivation

Terminal emulators on macOS increasingly look like they belong in a browser. Kytos takes a different approach: a native macOS application with real NSToolbar, inspector panels, and a desktop widget — powered by the same rendering engine as Ghostty.

The goal is a terminal that:

1. Renders perfectly — libghostty handles all terminal emulation, Metal rendering, and PTY management
2. Looks native — KelyphosKit provides NSToolbar, panels, and Liquid Glass vibrancy
3. Integrates deeply — shell integration via OSC sequences drives toolbar titles and navigator labels live
4. Persists reliably — workspace state, split trees, and tab groups survive relaunches

Architecture

Kytos is thin by design. It delegates terminal emulation entirely to libghostty and panel chrome entirely to KelyphosKit. The app's own code handles the bridge between them:

• KytosGhosttyApp — wraps ghostty_app_t, owns C callbacks and the app tick loop
• KytosGhosttyView — NSView subclass wrapping ghostty_surface_t, handles Metal layer and input
• KytosWorkspace — @Observable split tree model for one window
• KytosAppModel — manages window-to-workspace mapping, persistence, and tab restoration

Credits

Kytos is built on:

• Ghostty by Mitchell Hashimoto and contributors
• KelyphosKit for the shell chrome
• SwiftUI and AppKit for the application layer