ghostty-shaders

Pixel-art snow and stars shaders for Ghostty. Crisp, lightweight, and cozy — overlays the terminal without obscuring text.

just-snow

just-stars

What's here

File	Effect
just-snow.glsl	Pixel-snapped snowflakes with per-flake drift, sway, and flutter.
just-stars.glsl	Sparse twinkling plus-shaped stars across a dark sky.

Both sample the terminal texture as-is, so your prompt, colors, and content stay readable.

Install

1. Drop the .glsl files into your Ghostty shaders directory:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/ghostty/shaders
   cp just-snow.glsl just-stars.glsl ~/.config/ghostty/shaders/
   

2. Point Ghostty at one of them in ~/.config/ghostty/config:

   custom-shader = ~/.config/ghostty/shaders/just-snow.glsl
   custom-shader-animation = always
   

3. Reload Ghostty config (Cmd+Shift+, on macOS, or restart).

To swap shaders, edit custom-shader and reload.

Tweaking

The top of each file has #defines you can change without touching the rest:

just-snow.glsl

Define	Default	Effect
LAYERS	5	Total parallax layers.
SKIP_NEAR	4	Skip this many nearest layers (controls density).
DEPTH	0.4	Parallax falloff.
WIDTH	0.4	Diagonal drift strength.
SPEED	0.3	Fall speed.
PIXEL_SIZE	2.0	Snap grid in screen pixels. Larger = chunkier flakes.
CELL_SIZE	220.0	Pixels between potential flake positions.

just-stars.glsl

Define	Default	Effect
LAYERS	10	Total parallax layers.
SKIP_NEAR	2	Skip this many nearest layers.
DENSITY	0.01	Fraction of cells that contain a star.
SPEED	0.3	Twinkle rate.
PIXEL_SIZE	0.7	Snap grid in screen pixels.

Credits

The original "Just snow" shader is by Andrew Baldwin (2013) — thndl.com, Twitter @baldand. These files are reimplementations in a pixel-art style by Eli Saliman with Claude.

License

Released under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 — matching the upstream license. You may share and adapt for non-commercial use, with attribution, under the same license. See LICENSE or http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.