Editing Ghostty Config in Neovim
Finally, the new-kid-on-the-block of terminal emulators, Ghostty, has made its public debut! As someone who missed out on the beta program, I was eagerly counting down the days and jumped in as soon as it was released.
When I began configuring Ghostty, I noticed it uses its own simple
configuration format—essentially key = value pairs. Naturally, I tried
setting the filetype to ini with :set ft=ini, but the highlighting didn’t
quite hit the mark. So, I thought, “Why not write a custom syntax file?”
Perhaps I could even upstream it to vim/vim. But,
surprise! The Ghostty team had already done the hard work for me.
Ghostty generates a complete set of Vim/Neovim support files during its build
process: an
ftdetect, an
ftplugin,
and a syntax file.
These can be added to Vim’s runtimepath for automatic integration.
On macOS, these files are bundled in /Applications/Ghostty.app/.
On Linux, it’s likely in /usr/share/ghostty or
/usr/share/vim, I’m not sure. But you can always use the
$GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR environment variable as a platform-agnostic way to
locate them.
Then I discovered that changing the runtimepath yourself when you use Lazy.nvim is not that straightforward. So, I took the simpler route and just treated it as a local Lazy plugin:
return {
dir = (vim.env.GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR or "") .. "/../vim/vimfiles",
lazy = false, -- Ensures it loads for Ghostty config detection
name = "ghostty", -- Avoids the name being "vimfiles"
cond = vim.env.GHOSTTY_RESOURCES_DIR ~= nil, -- Only load if Ghostty is installed
}
Tada! Thanks to the great work by the authors, this now provides syntax
highlighting for the Ghostty config file. Bonus points:
<C-x><C-o>
completes the Ghostty options!