What is spookiui?

SpookiUI is a terminal based tool for configuring Ghostty, a terminal emulator. Normally, changing Ghostty's plain text config file means editing it by hand and manually triggering a reload to see the result. SpookiUI turns that into a live experience: you browse every setting Ghostty supports in an interactive text interface, and if you are running SpookiUI inside a Ghostty window, that same window repaints as you change values, so you can see the effect of a new theme, font, or opacity as you scroll through the choices. The tool is a single Python script with no third party dependencies, only the Python standard library, so you can run it directly from a cloned copy of the repository, or use an included install script that puts a spookiui command on your system for macOS or Linux. It reads the full list of available options straight from your installed copy of Ghostty rather than hardcoding them, so it always matches whatever version of Ghostty you have, and it automatically hides settings that do not apply to your operating system. Every change you make is validated by Ghostty itself before it is saved, so an invalid value gets rejected rather than breaking your config. A dated backup is created the first time you change something each day, and you can revert your whole session or reset entirely back to Ghostty's built in defaults, with a backup kept either way. On macOS, SpookiUI triggers a reload by clicking Ghostty's Reload Configuration menu item, which requires giving your terminal accessibility permission. On Linux it sends a signal to the running Ghostty process instead, which needs no extra permission. If neither method is available, your change is still saved and validated, and you are told to reload manually. The interface itself lets you search all options, jump between categories, edit values with pickers suited to their type such as toggles for on and off settings, searchable lists for themes and fonts with a live preview, and sliders for numeric ranges like opacity. It also supports saving and loading named configuration profiles, a built in health check for your config, and small one click fixes such as repairing SSH related settings.