The Bombadil Terminal Experiment

Last week at Bug Bash 2026, I had a bunch of interesting discussions about testing non-web interfaces with Bombadil, our new property-based testing framework for user interfaces. One direction that I already wanted to explore is terminal user interfaces (TUIs), and the hallway discussions gave me a nudge to get going. I started hacking on the flight back home, and a few days later that embryo of a TUI fuzzer started to emerge.

It’s built on top of two key crates:

1. portable-pty, a pseudo-teletype in Rust that runs the program under test, and
2. libghostty-vt, a Rust wrapper around the Zig library, which interprets the output of the PTY and provides a virtual terminal API from which you can read cell contents, styles, scroll through the scrollback, etc.

With these two in place, I built a very basic fuzzer for TUIs: it runs the command you give it, polls its output, and writes interleaved random input sequences (printable ASCII characters and ANSI escape sequences). It also scrolls and resizes the terminal occasionally. Timing is a bit tricky, but it seems the current approach works fine: polling reads until the terminal is idle, capture state, then apply new inputs. Regarding speed, it depends a lot on the program being tested, but it looks capable of capturing at least 300 states per second.

I tried finding some basic TUI programs and terminal games to test. Much to my surprise, within the first few days I had found four seemingly real bugs in real software:

• vitetris has a bug where if you enter just a number in the host name (e.g. 6) and try to connect to a remote game, the UI freezes.
• btop has two different bugs, one recently fixed that I confirmed fixed with the latest version (1.4.6), and one that I just reported. Both were triggered by this fuzzer.
• rlwrap got into a segfault which I haven’t yet been able to troubleshoot.

Pretty cool. Today, I merged this work to main in Bombadil. It’s not yet released, but if you’re curious you can try it already by downloading a bombadil-terminal binary from the CI artifacts. On macOS you’ll need to remove the quarantine bit to bypass GateKeeper.

Now, the work remains to make this a solid tool. Here are some future goals:

• Integrate it with the specification framework in Bombadil, so that you can define custom properties and action generators. It’d be neat to provide an API akin to querySelector that could parse and traverse panels drawn with box-drawing characters. You probably also want to validate that those borders line up correctly.
• Generate a lot more diverse input and terminal actions. For instance, generate sequences from the Kitty keyboard protocol.
• Make the test runner’s user interface better. Perhaps a TUI?!
• Make this part of the ordinary bombadil binary, I think. There could be subcommands for browser and terminal testing tools.
• Run it in Antithesis to see what that fuzzer can find.

All right, short post today — I just wanted to share my excitement and early results.

A huge thanks to Uzair Aftab, maintainer of libghostty-rs, for helping me get libghostty-vt building under Nix!