JetBrains IDE terminal switches from JediTerm to libghostty in 2026.3

Victoria Shinder29 October 2026, 09:191 min read

Starting with version 2026.3, the built-in terminal in JetBrains IDEs runs on libghostty, the terminal emulation library behind the Ghostty terminal, JetBrains announced. It replaces JediTerm, the emulator the IDEs relied on for years. libghostty now handles parsing and terminal state, while the IDE keeps rendering and higher-level integrations.

JetBrains frames the change around tools that push terminals harder than a shell prompt: CLI coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex, Neovim, tmux and dashboards. With the Kitty keyboard protocol, applications can tell Enter, Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Enter apart and receive key-release and repeat events, so Shift+Enter starts a new line in an agent prompt instead of sending a half-written message; xterm's modifyOtherKeys, used by Vim, is supported too, and the old Esc+CR setting is ignored. The terminal now answers dark/light theme queries from the IDE theme and notifies subscribed apps when it changes, and it answers palette and colour queries.

The new engine handles almost 50 control sequences that JediTerm ignored or misread. Examples given: the REP sequence that ncurses uses for runs of seven or more identical characters, which previously produced missing characters; colon-separated true-colour codes, which JediTerm printed literally; and stray APC, SOS and PM strings, now dropped instead of shown as text. libghostty already parses clipboard, desktop notifications, progress bars, Kitty graphics and styled underlines, which the IDE does not act on yet.

What it means

The visible fixes are small — a broken border, a stray colon — but they are the reason people kept a separate terminal open beside the IDE. Delegating emulation to a library many projects embed also means the IDE inherits its fixes. The features libghostty parses but the IDE ignores are the roadmap to watch.