Ghostty becomes the Windows terminal engine

PaneFlow 0.8.1 promotes the pinned, statically linked libghostty-vt engine to the default for new terminal sessions in published Windows x64 MSVC builds. Ghostty now owns VT parsing, terminal state, snapshots, and input encoding on Windows. PaneFlow continues to host processes through ConPTY and render through GPUI, so the integration keeps PaneFlow's native desktop model while replacing the terminal engine underneath it.

Alacritty remains available as an explicit rollback with terminal.backend = "alacritty". The setting applies to new sessions only and never swaps the engine underneath a running shell. Windows ARM64 and Windows GNU targets continue to use the Alacritty backend.

Windows terminal parity and reliability

• Ported the Ghostty-backed session host to ConPTY with keyboard and Kitty protocol input, mouse and focus reporting, bracketed paste, scrollback, search, selection, hyperlinks, resize, and lifecycle handling.
• Preserved OSC 7 working-directory tracking, OSC 52 clipboard policy, and OSC 133 shell integration on the Windows path.
• Fixed multiline Shift+Enter input through both PaneFlow's key translation and ConPTY so agents and shells receive the intended escape sequence.
• Batched Ghostty redraw notifications into a 4 ms window on Windows to avoid partial ConPTY frames, cursor jumps, and wakeup storms during output-heavy sessions.
• Completed ConPTY teardown before exit, joined the reader deterministically, and reaped probe descendants so shells do not leave handles or child processes behind.
• Added privacy-safe backend diagnostics that identify the requested and active engine without collecting command text, working directories, usernames, or terminal contents.
• Hardened Windows named-pipe IPC with overlapped I/O, bounded read and write deadlines, and a 256 KiB response cap.

Reproducible native Windows delivery

• Added the Windows MSVC foundation for libghostty-vt, including pinned native sources, generated headers and Rust bindings, verified exported symbols, and deterministic archive generation.
• Official MSI packages statically link the native engine. They require neither a Ghostty installation, a Ghostty DLL, nor Zig at runtime.
• Added package-level provenance, third-party notices, build metadata, a native manifest, and a CycloneDX SBOM, all checked against the binary installed by the MSI.
• The Windows qualification gates rebuild the native archive in a clean environment, compare reproducible output, verify hashes and symbols, exercise the terminal corpus and lifecycle, and enforce performance and handle-growth bounds.
• The release pipeline validates fresh installation, upgrade from v0.8.0, Ghostty and Alacritty startup paths, static provenance, updater relay, and uninstall on the Windows runner.
• Kept Windows ARM64 on the portable backend until its native Ghostty path has the same build, packaging, and runtime evidence as x64.

Desktop improvements

• PaneFlow now persists the main window size across launches, with display-aware bounds and minimum dimensions when the saved geometry no longer fits the active screen.
• Maximized Windows can be restored from PaneFlow's caption controls again.
• Native material is clipped and masked more consistently around the sidebar cards and main panel on Windows and macOS.
• macOS gains a configurable native Sidebar material in Appearance settings, with live updates and corrected backdrop alignment.
• Workspace drag reordering now shows the real before or after insertion edge while preserving stable row sizing.
• Agent completion dots are acknowledged after the workspace is viewed or used, instead of remaining stale in the sidebar.
• Application artwork was refreshed, with separate portable and macOS icon sources and an updated README hero.

Fixes and engineering hardening

• Made OSC 7 assertions and Windows-only helpers platform-aware so portable builds and tests stay warning-free.
• Stabilized native code generation for formatter tables, empty headers, and Windows point maps, and normalized patch line endings across Windows builds.
• Canonicalized Linux native archive ordering and strengthened reproducibility evidence across both Linux and Windows Ghostty builds.
• Hardened PTY resize probes, updater retry tests, terminal handle-growth diagnostics, and final-output cleanup.
• Pinned the Windows native toolchain and ConPTY qualification runner, while extending MSVC CI to compile, lint, test, and build the Ghostty feature.
• Updated release provenance checks for generated application icons and downloaded packaging assets without widening the runtime payload contract.
• Documented Windows backend selection, automatic promotion, rollback, diagnostics, qualification scope, and the bilingual Build Week implementation story.

Install and validation

Download the signed artifacts from this release or use the installation instructions.

The v0.8.1 release pipeline passed Linux x86_64 and ARM64 packaging, the notarized macOS ARM64 DMG, the signed Windows x64 MSI, five Linux distribution smokes, Windows install and upgrade behavior, static Ghostty provenance, and auto-update E2E before publishing 35 release assets with checksums and Minisign signatures.

Full Changelog: v0.8.0...v0.8.1