Calyx
Ghostty-Based macOS Terminal with Liquid Glass UI
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HN · launched Mar 12, 2026 · 28 upvotes (top 21%) · 0 views
Niche: terminal emulators and utilities · 106 launches, 1 in the last 7 days ▼ -88% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 106 launches in terminal emulators and utilities →
Could you build this?
No Building a custom GPU-accelerated macOS terminal emulator with advanced custom rendering (Liquid Glass UI) on top of Zig/Ghostty internals requires deep native systems programming, AppKit/Metal expertise, and terminal escape sequence plumbing.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires integrating with Ghostty's core terminal engine (written in Zig) and building custom macOS AppKit/Swift bindings with Metal or custom shaders to achieve glass-like UI effects while maintaining 60+ FPS terminal rendering, PTY management, and low-latency input processing.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ghostty, wezterm, iTerm2, Konsole, kitty
Concerns raised: Liquid Glass styling doesn't match Apple guidelines, Transparent UI makes text hard to read, Terminal content area doesn't properly support glass effect, Tagline mentions technical implementation instead of benefits, Obsession with transparency is unnecessary
Feature requests: Theme for iTerm2 instead of new application, Remove or improve titlebar design, Better accessibility when transparency effects disabled, Proper blur and opacity matching Apple's Liquid Glass
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 3563 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #740 of 3564 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 132 days after the earliest competitor.
- GhostVM · hn · 2026-03-16 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.76
- cmux: the open source terminal built for coding agents · yc · 2026-03-03 · 737 upvotes · similarity 0.70
- Otty · hn · 2026-06-17 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.70
- kuu · github · 2026-09-18 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.68
- ghostty-config · github · 2026-09-27 · 36 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- OmniPTY · hn · 2026-10-18 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- Bonsplit · hn · 2026-01-25 · 245 upvotes · similarity 0.66
- Dinky · github · 2026-09-26 · 24 upvotes · similarity 0.66
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.