A Zig terminal emulator with a LuaJIT runtime and Ghostty's VT core. Fully configurable via Lua — inspired by the Lua APIs from WezTerm and Neovim — with a plugin system for custom panes, overlays, and widgets.
A personal side project — built for around my personal workflow, but completely customizable for anyone else.
If you are new to the repo, start with the docs index.
- Zig + LuaJIT runtime with a full Lua API (
hollow.config,hollow.term,hollow.events,hollow.keymap,hollow.ui,hollow.htp, and more) - Ghostty's VT core for fast, accurate terminal emulation
- Tabs, split panes, floating panes, maximized panes, workspaces, customizable top bar
- Scrollback, selection, clipboard, hyperlink handling, font discovery, ligature, nerd fonts and emoji support
- Basic support for Kitty images and Sixel
- Windows domains for
pwsh,powershell,cmd, andwsl - Optional WSL PTY bypass helper with automatic ConPTY fallback (needed for full escape sequence support)
- Cross-platform targets: Windows, WSL (primary); Linux (planned), macOS (planned)
- Plugin system with Lua API for custom panes, overlays, and widgets (
hollow.plugins) - Sensible default UX but fully customizable via Lua config and plugins
Download a release: github.com/sudo-tee/hollow/releases
Windows builds include the optional hollow-wsl-bypass helper for WSL domains
(falls back to ConPTY automatically when the helper is absent).
Customize: copy conf/init.lua to %APPDATA%\hollow\init.lua (Windows) or
~/.config/hollow/init.lua (other).
Build from source:
Zig version: 0.15.2 only. If you use asdf or mise, run
asdf install or mise install from the repo root — .tool-versions is
already pinned.
./scripts/setup.sh # first-time submodule init
./launch.sh # Windows cross-build + run
zig build run # non-Windows build + run
Full build docs in Development.
The full guide set lives in docs/:
| Section | Start here |
|---|---|
| Guides | Getting started, Configuration, Keybindings, Panes/tabs/workspaces |
| Platforms | Windows, WSL, Linux, macOS |
| Reference | Lua API, CLI, Keymap actions |
| Examples | Config snippets, UI recipes, Plugin authoring |
Companion files: conf/init.lua (default config),
types/hollow.lua (LuaLS typings).
All keymaps are defined in conf/init.lua. The leader key is
<C-Space> (1200ms timeout). See the file for the full bindings or override
them in your user config via hollow.keymap.set.
- Hollow is still an active project and the API surface is still moving.
- The docs in this repo are meant to describe the current product, not a future roadmap.
- The current build is suitable for building, running, configuring, and packaging now, with Windows/WSL as the main tested target.