Hauntr: One-click multi-pane Ghostty layouts for your projects

If you read my last post about project management in the terminal, you know I have a simple bash script that lets me jump between projects with proj myproject.

That was the start of this.

Every time I opened a project I did the same thing: open Ghostty, jump to the folder, split panes, start the dev server, open the editor. Manually. Every time.

When I found out that Ghostty has native AppleScript support I wrote a quick test script. Split panes, run commands, all automated. 🙌🏼 It worked!

But writing a custom .applescript for each project isn’t a workflow. So I built 👻 Hauntr.

How Hauntr works

Hauntr is a macOS menu bar app. You design your project’s pane layout visually, assign commands to each pane, and launch everything with one click or from the CLI.

Hauntr for Ghostty

Features

Visual pane editor - split, assign commands, done
Custom names - 📰 Blog in the menu, blog in the terminal
Project groups - Client Work, Side Projects, keeps the menu clean
CLI tool - hauntr myproject from anywhere

Shell integration

Hauntr fits right next to my old proj script. I replaced proj with a single p() function that handles both:

p() {
  if [ "$2" = "win" ]; then
    hauntr "$1" --window
  elif [ "$2" = "here" ]; then
    hauntr "$1" --here
  elif [ "$2" = "cd" ]; then
    cd "$(hauntr "$1" --path)"
  else
    cd "$(hauntr "$@" --path)"
  fi
}

Now I have one shortcut for everything:

p blog          # cd into the project folder
p blog here     # launch layout in current window
p blog win      # launch layout in a new window

p blog alone just cds into the folder, same as before. When I want a full session I add here or win.

Open source

MIT license, built in Swift.

Try Hauntr and let me know what you think on X.