[HN Gopher] Ghostty is now non-profit
___________________________________________________________________
Ghostty is now non-profit
Author : vrnvu
Score : 1274 points
Date : 2025-12-03 18:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mitchellh.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mitchellh.com)
| simonw wrote:
| I wasn't aware of Hack Club before and wow, their fiscal
| sponsorship program is enormous: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-
| sponsorship/directory/ - looks like they cover more than 2,500
| organizations!
|
| The Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a
| much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on
| https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) and it keeps our
| accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack Club
| must have this down to a very fine art.
|
| I wrote a bit more about PSF fiscal sponsorship here:
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...
| conradev wrote:
| Hack Club builds software, so the students naturally built a
| banking product to scale their fiscal sponsorship:
| https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/
|
| I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN
| client (https://github.com/hackclub/burrow) but never got the
| momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a
| really fantastic organization.
|
| The students have one big global Slack instance. If you're a
| student and on here, you should also be in there:
| https://hackclub.com/slack/
| kace91 wrote:
| This community sounds amazing, is there anything similar for
| adults rather than teens?
|
| The "understanding through building" mentality is something I
| never got to experience as a group, the obvious answer is
| open source and the like but I wonder if there's something
| more learning oriented.
| mellowyeller wrote:
| Seconding this. I pivoted to tech in my early 30s and feel
| I've missed out on a lot of community building
| opportunities.
| leetrout wrote:
| Recurse Center might be a good option
| https://www.recurse.com
| conradev wrote:
| I would second Recurse Center. I've heard universally
| great things!
| rrampage wrote:
| Recurse center is awesome! The community is curious, kind
| and supportive. I did 2 batches there and each one
| expanded my horizons as a programmer.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Self-plug: consider Handmade Cities. We have a simple
| meetups [0] page if you decide you appreciate our ethos.
| Hopefully we have an active meetup location near you?
|
| In any case, good luck on finding the right community!
|
| [0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups
| MrChoke wrote:
| My city is on the list but when I submit I get a 404
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Which one is this? Las Vegas? If you don't wish to reveal
| it here shoot an email so we can fix it: support at
| handmadecities dot com
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I know I'm jaded but anytime I see a business situation and
| they specifically say you must be a MINOR to work with
| them... I get kinda suspicious.
|
| >Yes, I'm a teenager ,18 and under
|
| So not actually a teenager but a minor is what they mean
| and use what I would call deceptive language around it. But
| why?....
| squigz wrote:
| Yeah, I get suspicious when schools say only minors can
| enroll there
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| You already made the point but yea that's overly jaded to
| a significant degree
| coldtea wrote:
| That's not jaded, that's paranoid-ly misreading this.
|
| It's an organization for hacking working with high
| schools and young people. They don't want small children
| enrolled, and they don't want older people.
|
| "teenager 18 and under" is perfectly fine description for
| 13-18 or 7th to 12th grade.
| komali2 wrote:
| It's tangential but civic hack groups might offer what
| you're looking for. There's Code for America in the states
| and g0v in Taiwan and some other places.
| CactusBlue wrote:
| MMW: this will likely end up being the SVB for nonprofits
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| They're using Column (https://column.com/) under the hood,
| so more like Stripe (payments + Atlas) for non profits I
| think? Still very powerful and material value of course on
| top of the banking partner primitive.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > The students have one big global Slack instance.
|
| Are you back on Slack as the primary comms channel after
| their sudden attempt to upcharge you (followed by the U-turn
| after the PR backlash)? Do you have some mirroring and other
| kind of fallback strategy if something like that happens
| again?
|
| (Context for those who missed it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887)
| conradev wrote:
| I do not speak for the 'club, but I believe it was
| resolved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292042
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Yes, as I mentioned, Slack made a U-turn after the thread
| got popular and became a PR disaster (after having
| ignored the issue again and again previously). That kind
| of behaviour indicates a service that shouldn't be relied
| on so much, at least not without low-friction alternates
| that you keep ready to jump onto, in case some exec there
| decides again that the Club is too tempting a prize to
| not attempt another squeeze.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| We interviewed their founder Zach Latta on the EFF podcast[1]
| a few years back: I hadn't heard of them either, but he was
| pretty impressive, both on the goals and the political
| issues.
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-
| hack-f...
| garyhtou wrote:
| I love seeing PSF support the community with fiscal
| sponsorship! It makes such a huge difference for these open
| source projects and meetups, letting them focus on software and
| community rather than the legal/financial back-office work.
|
| Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since
| 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run
| engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there
| and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
|
| oh, and while it's on my mind, the codebase was open-sourced
| earlier this year
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802), and we just
| launched a mobile app yesterday!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Hack Club was featured on front page not long ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663
|
| It might have improved since then?
| dragonsenseiguy wrote:
| Yes, they have hired a lawyer. Also, as part of Hack Club it
| is an incredible place, meeting like minded people,
| participation in hackathons, member run programs like
| YSWS(You Ship We Ship) and much more!
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _their fiscal sponsorship program is
| enormous:https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/_
|
| Ouch, that _is_ enormous. They forgot to handle images
| properly, so they're serving ginormous images in inefficient
| formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats--just
| the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is
| just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things
| like 11827x13107 "17230 Aluminium Falcons" logo being rendered
| at 64px high. (I'm surprised that one's under 9MB.) Across
| pages 1-3, it's averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues
| all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I'd
| expect most to be under 10KB, with a _few_ up as high as 50KB,
| staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for
| all 53 pages. It'd load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
|
| (I know this isn't what you meant, but it loaded _so_ slowly
| that I looked, and that's easily big enough to cause problems
| for some users.)
| Barbing wrote:
| Just let them know (admittedly not through a previously known
| reliable channel FYI, I'm a stranger)
| conradev wrote:
| and as with most things in Hack Club... it's open source :)
|
| https://github.com/hackclub/hcb/issues/12314
| dragonsenseiguy wrote:
| It's incredible! HCB is a member run project where teens can
| also make their own non profits! Even Hack Clubs finances are
| made public at https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/
| bos wrote:
| Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a
| sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-
| backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.
| neural_thing wrote:
| "sustainable foundation" it's still one guy funding it, no?
| seems as sustainable as before
| simonw wrote:
| 33 additional people funding it as of this announcement:
| https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions
| mitchellh wrote:
| You can't build a house without the foundation (pun
| intended).
|
| I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor,
| but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a
| sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or
| technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others
| could even join in financially. Now there is.
|
| All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more
| details, please read it. I assume you didn't.
|
| I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work
| eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply
| coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and
| lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with
| other software foundations to determine proper processes etc.
| I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
| skywhopper wrote:
| How do you expect that to change? What is the next step in
| your mind? Maybe asking for donations? If only he would set
| up some way that the general public could contribute money to
| the project! That'd be the smart thing to do. Then he could
| write a blog post about it, and maybe someone would post a
| link to HN. That'd really be something.
| fragmede wrote:
| To be fair, that one guy happens to be the OG Mitchell
| Hashimoto, who's worth a giant pile of money from selling
| terraform to IBM, and he's the guy actually writing it in the
| first place, so I don't think that's, like, a terrible
| horrible no good issue.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Good. Maybe they'll add search to the terminal now. /s
| simonw wrote:
| https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 -
| "Ghostty on macOS now has search [...] GTK to follow soon" -
| November 26th 2025
| mitchellh wrote:
| GTK is also merged. Main branch has search. Its also
| exposed via libghostty for embedders.
| anorwell wrote:
| But only in the the tip (nightly) build. I'm somewhat
| tempted to switch to them for this.
| cpach wrote:
| A while ago I compiled Ghostty from HEAD, because it had
| a bug fix I cared for. It was a very stable and pleasant
| experience. No hassle whatsoever.
| memco wrote:
| If you'd like you can also use `tip` as the update
| channel to get the nightly build binary without having to
| compile it yourself:
| https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#auto-update-
| channe...
| cpach wrote:
| Ah. Cool!
| ilvez wrote:
| If you need to do that again note that there is asdf
| plugin as well ;-)
|
| For Linux compiling is actually the only way to get tip.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I'm hoping they'll get around to supporting command-number
| for switching between windows[0]. command-` is fine but
| clunky as hell when you have more than three or four windows.
| Without command-number, I'm still stuck using iTerm2 as my
| daily driver.
|
| (It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI
| conventions[1] too)
|
| [0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/8131
|
| [1] https://github.com/ghostty-
| org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
| therealmarv wrote:
| A little unfair that this is downvoted. No search is like a
| dealbreaker for me. I'm happy with iTerm and for 99% of my
| use cases I don't need a "very fast" terminal. Thanks for
| pointing this out.
|
| Seems I will wait a little longer before search is in the
| regular build (and not nightly ones)
| tristan957 wrote:
| Ghostty 1.3 will release in March.
| mindcrash wrote:
| Rather thank IBM for paying Mitchell an outrageous amount of
| money for Hashicorp, so he can devote all of his time on
| awesome projects like Ghostty without ever thinking about
| sustainable income ever again.
|
| So thanks, IBM! <3
| veverkap wrote:
| While you're not wrong, I think this undersells a little how
| much Mitchell has given of his time to OSS. Yes, he's
| fortunate that he doesn't have to worry about money, but even
| when he did, he still contributed openly and freely.
|
| That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first
| place - giving back.
| mindcrash wrote:
| It's a little tongue-in-cheek, but as you can see elsewhere
| in this discussion thread he mentions this himself on his
| own X account:
|
| "get asked the same about terminals all the time. "How will
| you turn this into a business? What's the monetization
| strategy?" The monetization strategy is that my bank
| account has 3 commas mate."
|
| https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
|
| Take a good guess where the three commas come from.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3
| commas mate."
|
| Having money doesn't mean that you'll have the motivation
| to continue working on something for free forever.
| lillecarl wrote:
| Free work is the most rewarding work on every metric but
| monetization in my experience, and when you hit road
| bumps you can pay your way out of it to keep going.
| Sounds like the literal dream
| KPGv2 wrote:
| Without turning this into a brag session, this is my
| experience. I don't have to worry about money anymore, so
| I get to work on cool projects at my own pace, do things
| that probably sound pointless to most, and it doesn't
| matter if it's successful. The important thing is that
| I'm interested.
|
| I'm not as talented as Mitchell tho.
| charcircuit wrote:
| There are a ton of different projects one can devote free
| work to. Eventually one will get bored and want to change
| things up.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| Tres Commas!
| cholantesh wrote:
| I didn't think it was possible for anyone to express this
| thought more obnoxiously than DHH but here we are.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| The obnoxious one here is the person obsessed with
| monetization, not the person who throws their ignorance
| back in their face. Every hobby these days has to be
| monetized; it's fucking gross.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Is DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) worth 100M USD? Google
| results say he is worth about 50M USD... so "only" two
| commas.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| Three comma club is for billionaires.
| walletdrainer wrote:
| I think the bigger thing here is that even with three
| commas in his bank account he lacks the good sense to not
| associate with DHH.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Money begets the freedom to work on causes. Monetization
| was always a core part of Hashicorp, rather than being a
| bolt-on after years of OSS. Which is a good thing. (I was a
| customer of the first commercial offering from Hashicorp,
| their VMWare add-on for Vagrant)
| notpushkin wrote:
| But when you already have money, you can skip the "how
| can I work on this and not starve to death?" part.
| heipei wrote:
| I'd rather he'd still be working on Nomad to be honest, but
| Ghostty is a good consolation prize ;)
| jen20 wrote:
| IBM did not do that, HashiCorp was a public company before
| their acquisition.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| I always feel weird thanking IBM. On one hand, they've funded
| numerous FOSS projects, and made the thinkpad, an amazing CPU
| architecture (PPC), and seem to be the only ones actually
| innovating in the tech space sometimes. On the other hand,
| they bought Redhat and seem actively hostile to any FOSS
| projects that don't make them money
| jarjoura wrote:
| There are hundreds of thousands of software engineers who,
| given FU amounts of money, would absolutely keep writing
| software and do it only for the love of it. The companies that
| hire us usually make us sign promises that we won't work on
| side projects. Even if there are legal workarounds to that,
| it's not quite so simple.
|
| Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow
| right back into the neighborhoods through insane property
| values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains.
| So, it's always just the few of us who can win that lottery and
| truly break out of the cycle.
| yalok wrote:
| moonlighting is permitted by law in California (companies
| legally can't prevent you from doing it, iiuc), as long as
| there's no conflict of interest with your main job...
| fragmede wrote:
| As long as you don't use their hardware to do it.
| jarjoura wrote:
| that goes without saying, but it's still not free
| permission when you use your own stuff.
| jarjoura wrote:
| "no conflict of interest" is basically meaningless if your
| day job is writing software. These clauses you sign are
| quite broad in what that scope of conflict could be.
|
| Every company I've worked for has had very explicit rules
| that say, you must get written permission from someone at
| some director or VP level sign off on your "side project,"
| open source or not.
|
| You might want to check your company guidelines around this
| just to make sure you're safe.
| kyrra wrote:
| Side projects that aren't a conflict of interest when
| working at Google is rather limiting. Likely less so for
| small companies.
| yalok wrote:
| Not really, in my personal experience and per my friends,
| most of big companies are pretty lenient about it, except
| for Apple.
| saagarjha wrote:
| No, they're pretty strict. It just changes what you are
| allowed to do, with Apple being very restrictive in not
| letting you do it at all.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back
| into the neighborhoods through insane property values and
| other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it's
| always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly
| break out of the cycle.
|
| You break out of the cycle by selling your HCOL home and
| moving to LCOL after a few years. That HCOL home will have
| appreciated fast enough given the original purchase price
| that the growth alone would easily pay for a comparable home
| in a LCOL area. This is the story of my village in Texas,
| where Cali people have been buying literal mansions after
| moving out of their shitboxes in LA and the Bay Area.
| codeptualize wrote:
| This seems really nice. Wasn't aware of hack club but that just
| looks like a wonderful construction and organization.
|
| In a world of VC backed open source projects with big profit
| motivations, it's refreshing to see things like this. Definitely
| going to give ghostty another try!
| tcdent wrote:
| I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use
| everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via
| Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome
| opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.
| Arcuru wrote:
| I give a lot of money to the free things I use as well, but
| even if I used Ghostty I'd struggle to give them any money
| since the founder is extraordinarily wealthy.
|
| Please fund projects that actually need it, and don't
| voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire.
|
| > I get asked the same about terminals all the time. "How will
| you turn this into a business? What's the monetization
| strategy?" The monetization strategy is that my bank account
| has 3 commas mate.
|
| Original post:
| https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
| mitchellh wrote:
| My intention is that the project isn't wholly dependent on
| me, so that I can move on (one day) and refocus my efforts
| elsewhere. I think no matter who the donor is, any charity
| dependent on the welfare of a single large whale is not a
| healthy organization. I intend to resolve this over time.
|
| That all being said, everyone should give where they want,
| and if you don't want to give to a terminal emulator non-
| profit project, then don't! Don't let anyone bully you (me,
| the person I'm responding to, or anyone else) into what you
| should and shouldn't charitably support. Enjoy.
|
| (Also, I don't want to repeat this everywhere but I paid
| taxes and I lost a comma, so no need to worry about that
| anymore! Everyone please pull out your most microscopic
| violins! )
| komali2 wrote:
| > Also, I don't want to repeat this everywhere but I paid
| taxes and I lost a comma, so no need to worry about that
| anymore! Everyone please pull out your most microscopic
| violins!
|
| Well, since we're talking about it, maybe you're down to
| answer a question I've always wondered about: money into
| the hundred millions, let alone billions, is for me an
| unfathomable amount of capital for one person to wield.
| I've always thought, if I ever had that kind of power to
| swing around, I'd spend it all trying to solve every
| problem I could get my hands on, until there was nothing
| left but my retirement fund (which could be 10 million and
| still let me spend hundreds of millions while retiring in
| permanent wealthy comfort). Hunger in specific areas,
| housing crises, underfunded education, across the world
| many issues that, at least locally, one individual with
| that kind of money could, so far as I can tell,
| independently resolve.
|
| Why aren't the ultra rich doing it? You seem to have a more
| philanthropic mind than most, you're doing this cool
| project and nobody can deny your FOSS contributions. But
| even you are still holding onto keeping that count into the
| hundreds rather than the tens - is there some quality of
| life aspect hidden to us that's just really difficult to
| imagine giving up or something? Yacht life? Private
| flights? Chumming it up with Gabe and Zuck?
|
| Becoming that wealthy won't happen to me but if it did,
| what would change about me that'd make me not want to spend
| it all anymore?
| 59nadir wrote:
| While I understand that people might downvote the parent
| post because it seems in bad taste and touches on a
| culturally sensitive thing, haven't we all wondered this?
| Why is it that the poor give relatively more generously
| than the rich?
|
| It's such an interesting phenomenon that so many ultra
| rich people are essentially just hoarding wealth beyond
| what they should reasonably be able to even have use of
| in multiple generations. Worse, some of them simply
| cannot seem to get enough and will literally commit
| crimes and/or do indisputably morally wrong things to get
| even more.
|
| I would personally never ask anyone this, and I wouldn't
| expect anyone who could answer it to actually answer it,
| but I think what komali2 asked is one of the most
| interesting questions out there.
| defen wrote:
| > don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire.
|
| The entire point of this post is that the money is not going
| to him.
| nodesocket wrote:
| I love Mitchell's X post awhile back:
|
| "What the monetization strategy of Ghostty?"
|
| "My monetization strategy is that my bank account has 10 digits
| in it..." lol, epic.
| losvedir wrote:
| Ha. That counts the cents, though, I assume? I didn't think
| Hashicorp was _that_ big, right?
| nodesocket wrote:
| Shockingly I believe billionaire with a B. They timed the
| acquisition nearly perfect in terms of market conditions.
| Tres comma club!!!
| bombcar wrote:
| Loving the idea that he got a bank transfer for $1b and
| it's still just sitting there in his checking account.
| nodesocket wrote:
| I would assume it's not sitting in his checking account.
| He _hopefully_ has wealth advisors; earning interest,
| investments, tax strategies. Mitchell is super smart, so
| almost certainly not sitting in a checking account.
| Romario77 wrote:
| Hashicorp was sold for 6.5B to IBM.
|
| Another thing - when it went public it was valued at 13B and
| Hashimoto owned 8.5% of it according to the filing.
|
| So, depending on when he sold or converted his shares it is
| pretty plausible that he got a billion.
| asadm wrote:
| was that big
| maxmoehl wrote:
| Original post:
| https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
|
| > I get asked the same about terminals all the time. "How will
| you turn this into a business? What's the monetization
| strategy?" The monetization strategy is that my bank account
| has 3 commas mate.
| trueno wrote:
| tres commas and doors that go like this
|
| chad
| LennyHenrysNuts wrote:
| ...and another $150k from my family...
|
| Wow.
| sethops1 wrote:
| Not to dismiss the generosity, but he's a billionaire.
|
| A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.
| alkh wrote:
| The only thing I am missing now from Ghostty is being able to
| open it in any open Finder folder with a keyboard shortcut(like
| standard Ubuntu terminal). Ghostty already provides Finder-
| specific GUI shortcut but you need to use a mouse. Otherwise,
| stellar work(especially the ease of configuring it) and congrats
| to everyone involved!
| orbsa wrote:
| Can you not bind the command "open ." to a keybind through
| Ghostty?
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I think they are looking for the opposite: open a Ghostty
| window from Finder.
| alkh wrote:
| Yeah, exactly, like Ctrl+Alt+T opening Xterm in Ubuntu. If
| I am not mistaken, if you have a file explorer open it will
| automatically open terminal in that specific folder(i.e.
| kind of like `cd`ing there first)
| duskwuff wrote:
| Wrong direction. OP wants to open Ghostty from a Finder
| window, not vice versa.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| You can set a keyboard shortcut for that GUI menu entry (and
| most others) in macOS system settings.
| presbyterian wrote:
| I do this with an Alfred workflow, I hit command+space and then
| type "ft" and it opens the front most Finder window's directory
| in Terminal (or iTerm, you can set it to whatever)
| sdqali wrote:
| This can be done through Nautilus scripts.
|
| > cat ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/Ghostty
|
| #!/usr/bin/env bash
|
| ghostty --working-directory=$(pwd)
|
| > cat ~/.config/nautilus/scripts-accels
|
| <Ctrl><Shift>F4 Ghostty
| rvz wrote:
| Smart decision and makes sense.
|
| Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly
| abandoned.
|
| Reminds me of Signal.
| srameshc wrote:
| I never realize Ghostty is a project by Mitchell Hashimoto. I am
| very happy with tmux and never seriously looked at it , now I
| really curious what is it about and how it is different than say
| tmux ?
| ubercore wrote:
| It's a terminal, not a multiplexer. Different type of product.
| simonw wrote:
| It's not an alternative to tmux, it's an alternative to the
| macOS Terminal.app or iTerm2.
|
| You can run tmux inside Ghostty.
| nurettin wrote:
| For those who will read this literally, it works fine on
| linux as well.
| dmit wrote:
| To be fair, you can also run tmux inside tmux (inside Zellij,
| inside another tmux, inside screen, etc). :)
| alwillis wrote:
| tmux is another terminal layer inside of any terminal.
|
| Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.
| dagi3d wrote:
| I really love Ghostty. Thanks to it, my comeback to (n)vim has
| been quite smooth. Keybindings with the CMD key works right away
| without having to send any escape sequence or similar. It just
| works(tm)
| trueno wrote:
| ive found ghostty to be a pretty decent replacement for iterm2,
| some bugs still being worked out and i havent always had the
| best luck with the guake dropdown style terminal but all in all
| it's pretty nice. sort of miss the additional hot-key invoking
| options iterm2 had (i could double tap control or cmd to
| invoke) and ghostty is a lil more limited there, but overall
| its solid, doesn't feel bloated. iterm2's settings gui was a
| total tragedy. there was some xterm related issue i ran into
| ssh'ing into a vps but i can't even remember for the life of me
| what that was.
|
| i didnt even consider that having to configure everything with
| a config file allows apps like this
| https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config to exist. neat
| misiti3780 wrote:
| i agree, you can search in the terminal like you can iterm2
| either, which is super annoying.
| jtbaker wrote:
| It's merged to main but not in any district channels yet
| AFAIK
| pprotas wrote:
| Regarding the SSH issue (if anyone else reading this had the
| same):
|
| Certain CLI tools complain about unknown $TERM env vars. For
| example, I could not open vim when SSHing into my Hetzner VPS
| in Ghostty. The fix is to set TERM to some well-known
| alternative before running your tool, like so: TERM=xterm vim
| trueno wrote:
| oh my god this was it. thank you!! (i never fixed it but im
| going to now!)
| dagi3d wrote:
| adding this should also do the trick: shell-integration-
| features = ssh-env
| helterskelter wrote:
| Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say,
| gnome-terminal or foot?
| smw wrote:
| It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.
| sramsay wrote:
| There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind
| toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day
| long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language
| that hasn't yet hit 1.0.
|
| Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most
| importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the
| slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that
| happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.
| tristan957 wrote:
| The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit as well.
| mindcrash wrote:
| While foot focuses on minimalism, Ghostty brings along a shit
| ton of features like support for Kitty's
| (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) graphics protocol (in
| terminal images! - https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-
| protocol/), advanced window management (windows, tabs, splits)
| and OpenGL pixelshaders (https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-
| shaders.html)
|
| Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
| loeg wrote:
| gnome-terminal still writes out its scrollback history to the
| filesystem, potentially on-disk and not just tmpfs. It uses
| encryption to obfuscate that these days, but, it's still pretty
| weird behavior. Its performance is also relatively poor.
| crims0n wrote:
| One fun thing, it supports shaders: https://catskull.net/fun-
| with-ghostty-shaders.html
| neop1x wrote:
| Or WezTerm which is much more usable and polished than this. I
| don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media
| hype.
| tristan957 wrote:
| I use Ghostty because it is a native application, and it
| looks great on macOS and GNOME. WezTerm, Kitty, and Foot
| don't do that for me. Foot is great though.
| viraptor wrote:
| They're all native applications.
| saagarjha wrote:
| No, they're not. Don't be pedantic that it's native
| because it is written in Rust or whatever, that's clearly
| not what was meant.
| viraptor wrote:
| There's no single definition of native. If it's clearly
| not that for you, feel free to say what's the threshold
| you use.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| After some update, Ghostty stopped working on Gnome+Mesa on
| older Intel graphics (IvyBridge). It doesn't really feel
| native to me if it doesn't run everywhere the toolkit it
| uses runs. I understand the reasons, but it leaves a sour
| taste.
| alwillis wrote:
| > I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social
| media hype.
|
| It's not hype. Here's a comprehensive review of a lot of
| terminals and Ghostty did very well--"State of Terminal
| Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions" [1]
|
| [1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-
| emulation-2...
| akho wrote:
| Have you read the post you linked, and do you understand
| what it is about?
| a96 wrote:
| No sign of alacritty :(
| coastalpuma wrote:
| Wezterm is an excellent project but it doesn't have native UI
| chrome like Ghostty does.
| tristan957 wrote:
| gnome-terminal is GTK 3 last I checked, and foot uses Wayland
| primitives. If you want a native terminal feel, Ghostty would
| be a great terminal. On Linux, my backup terminal is Ptyxis,
| authored by Christian Hergert. I recommend Ptyxis over gnome-
| terminal or gnome-console.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Ghostty feels a lot less native than foot on Wayland.
| Example: it doesn't respect Fontconfig preferences, so it
| doesn't use your configured monospace font. In general,
| Ghostty feels quite alien for me.
| dmytrokow wrote:
| FWIW, I found no reason to switch from Konsole.
|
| But I'm using KDE anywa, and I don't care about kitty graphic
| protocol, I have better suited apps to watch images.
| sdqali wrote:
| - It looks good. Or more correctly, it is easy to make it look
| good. If one spends a lot of time in the Terminal emulator, it
| looking good has some positives.
|
| - It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and
| version control.
|
| Edit: - At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs
| is limited to starting an entirely new process.
| akho wrote:
| the edit is not true. footclient is, like, right there.
| celrod wrote:
| I use niri and footclient -N, so builtin window and tab
| completion don't appeal to be.
|
| Foot feels fast, but I've not actually measured the
| latency. It also seems to use less CPU than GPU accelerated
| terminals (which it isn't) from just glancing at btop. So
| I'm not sold on GPU-acceleration as a feature unless I see
| benchmarks demonstrating the value in improved latency and
| reduced CPU use compared to foot
|
| I love that foot's scrollback search, selection expansive,
| and copy can be entirely keyboard driven. Huge QoL feature
| for me that often seems neglected to me in other terminals.
| sdqali wrote:
| I had never tried footclient. Thank you for the correction.
| Hazematman wrote:
| My biggest reason for using it over gnome terminal is osc52
| support https://ali.anari.io/posts/osc52/ which lets you copy
| paste using a escape sequence. Meaning you can copy paste when
| ssh'ed into another machine. Gnome terminal doesn't support
| this currently and there is a discussion on whether they will
| because of security concerns
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer
| over the Mac's Terminal, for example?
| focom wrote:
| One personal gripe: Compared to the default terminal, ghostty,
| close the terminal on ctrl+d.
| Xiol wrote:
| People use something other than CTRL-D to exit their
| terminal?
| dbacar wrote:
| i type exit
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| Same. I didn't know Ctrl-D did anything.
| quesera wrote:
| Ctrl+D is the ASCII End Of File (EOF) marker.
|
| Software that takes text input should interpret that as
| the end of the input.
|
| Shells decide that end of input means it's time to exit.
| Terminals usually decide that if the shell exits, there's
| nothing else to do and so close the window.
|
| macOS Terminal.app instead prints "Process exited", which
| I can't quite fathom the value of. I guess it's
| marginally less confusing than making the window
| disappear. :)
|
| (Note though -- I can't find it in Terminal.app settings
| right now, but there must be a way to change the
| behaviour to close the window instead. Mine is configured
| that way, but it's not the default)
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| Thanks. It exists, and I found that I already have it
| active. In Settings, it's under Profiles / Shell and the
| control is
|
| When the shell exits: - Close if the shell existed
| cleanly
| bombcar wrote:
| Process exited is somewhat useful if you want to look at
| the results-but even then I think it exits automatically
| if you opened it by double clicking a script.
| dbacar wrote:
| In fact I know the ctrl-d stuff, yet it is too much
| strain on your wrist if you use a finger to press the
| CTRL. Takes longer but typing exit is way easier.
|
| Alternatively I use the intersection of my palm and left
| pinky to press CTRL.
|
| :)
| fragmede wrote:
| Remap caps-lock to be ctrl to save yourself from RSI.
| kergonath wrote:
| Command-Q? Or command-W to close only the current window.
| eviks wrote:
| Yes, of course, many people use the same shortcut for the
| same action in all the apps
| hamburglar wrote:
| Good. That weird "keep the window open after ctrl+d" behavior
| is annoying.
| coder543 wrote:
| Terminal.app also closes the window when the shell exits if
| you change a setting: Settings -> Profiles -> Shell -> When
| the shell exits -> Close the window
| jeanlucas wrote:
| Against Mac's terminal I'd recommend ghostty. Just the support
| for more characters and better defaults are a good reason.
|
| Yet, I use WezTerm, won't be switching soon.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| For me:
|
| - easy to customise using a simple, easy to understand config
|
| - supports non-native full screen so I don't need to wait for
| the virtual desktop transition animation on Mac to finish...
|
| - has a friendly community
|
| - it's a good model for building sustainable products/tools
|
| and, with all of the above: it doesn't feel like a compromise
| kccqzy wrote:
| It's just faster when you accidentally dump large amount of
| text or binary onto the Terminal. You can measure this by
| running `time cat` on a multi-gigabyte file and observing the
| wall clock time.
| throwaway29827 wrote:
| So the same Hack Club from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 is now managing
| donations. Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna be donating to Ghostty
| any time soon. Just seems like a deeply unserious organization
| all around.
| patcon wrote:
| they are great, and I feel your concern is misplaced.
|
| when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the
| internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced,
| famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a
| handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship
| debugnik wrote:
| "Beef" is a strange way to denote reacting to adults relying
| on unsupervised teenagers to manage PII and then hiding and
| denying their mistakes. The beef here seems to be from one
| whose complaints about it were dismissed, instead of taken
| seriously.
| purpleidea wrote:
| This is great work and good news, however if you want to
| guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA!
| A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work
| proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work
| for them for free.
|
| Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so
| here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
| simonw wrote:
| Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the
| amount of value your software can create in the world.
|
| I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if
| it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number
| of people.
| miclill wrote:
| I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of
| copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux
| kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs
| combined (citation needed)...
| simonw wrote:
| I'd be really interested in hearing more about that
| argument.
|
| I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind
| of software where forcing companies to submit code back to
| it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an
| operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of
| different hardware.
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah. Also things like filesystems. More generally, the
| history of BSD is _full_ of proprietary forks that never
| got merged back in: Ultrix, SunOS, BSDI 's BSD/386 (later
| BSD/OS), Winsock, and the Wollongong TCP/IP stack on
| UNICOS and, I think, also on VMS. The most famous fork is
| macOS Darwin, which I think is still in fact open source,
| but it's been many years since I saw someone successfully
| running the open-source Darwin.
|
| Also, though, GCC got Objective-C support, and still has
| it, because the FSF told NeXT it would violate the GPL
| for them to attempt to make Objective-C a proprietary
| add-on to the GCC compiler, even if it wasn't literally
| linked with it. And a lot of GCC backends probably would
| have been kept proprietary by one or another hardware
| company if the license had allowed it.
| eviks wrote:
| How does Windows without such force to contribute code
| back have better drivers?
| simonw wrote:
| I imagine because the Windows team at Microsoft have an
| annual budget measured in billions of dollars.
| knowknow wrote:
| Keep in mind that Linux doesn't use the GPL3 and stuck with
| the GPL2 since the maintainers and Linus Torvalds thought
| that it was overly restrictive [1]. So at some point the
| license friction becomes too large to be practical for
| organizations to use or contribute to.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU
| oblio wrote:
| > Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than
| all the BSDs combined (citation needed)
|
| I don't think there is any citation needed. Linux powers
| all the cloud providers, 80% of the mobile market, a ton of
| random devices. At this point Linux is the most important
| OS on the planet, ahead of Windows and Apple OSes. It's
| just not as visible.
| dulvui wrote:
| On the other hand having a copyleft license without CLA makes
| rug pulls nearly impossible (once there are multiple
| contributors and copyright holders). But you are right, from
| a (commercial) value perspective, permissive wins.
| purpleidea wrote:
| > Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the
| amount of value your software can create in the world.
|
| That "friction" is by design. It prevents someone else from
| screwing over the users.
|
| The people that oppose copyleft are those it was specifically
| design to protect against.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It's sad, people have really been shitting on copyleft
| licenses the past few years, when they are critical to
| ensuring our computing freedoms are preserved.
|
| Copyleft protects the user. The friction is, like you said,
| by design. It ensures that something that started free,
| stays free, and can't be rug pulled out from under you.
|
| Big monied interests have been trying, and succeeding, in
| changing the discourse around free software away from free
| and to simply just "open source" and moving toward
| permissive licenses, specifically so community effort can
| be extracted and monetized without contributing back.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| I truly respect this statement, and position. I always hope
| that the benefit I've provided through my software is felt,
| even if I don't directly benefit from it. It's about taking
| pride in your work, and what it has brought others. I think
| of it as a craft, like woodworking, brewing, art, music, etc.
| While there are far more rules, the love of it is what makes
| it viable.
|
| I suspect that those who express concern over your work being
| ripped off are just showing that they are extremely happy
| with how you run things. Rather than being under the control
| of another entity, the actual value is in your personal
| involvement. That's just my two cents, I hope I'm not putting
| words in anyone's mouth.
|
| EDIT: I realize that you aren't the creator of Ghostty, but
| my original statement seemed like I was stating this.
| bsimpson wrote:
| BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who
| published it is one of the few people who has actually been
| involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The
| whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided
| copyleft licenses are a false goal.
|
| You should watch his talk:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g
|
| (He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for
| embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar
| project under the more free MIT license.)
| Karliss wrote:
| Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for
| end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term
| proprietary fork won? Most of the recent variations of this
| that come to my mind are related to cloud infrastructure. Stuff
| where you have serious business customers.
|
| And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it.
| Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free
| have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing
| users are already choosing the open source option despite the
| existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for
| commercial solutions to exist.
|
| Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI
| craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the
| Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors
| derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.
|
| There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source
| software with little long term impact.
| tristan957 wrote:
| > Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening
| for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long
| term proprietary fork won?
|
| VSCode is a proprietary fork of code-oss, the product located
| at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. It might not be an
| example that you're looking for though.
| asim wrote:
| Kudos to Mitchell for doing it. Unfortunately the "rug pull"
| issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on
| their non profit status, but knowing Mitchell, he's not about the
| money, power, status, etc so the project is in good hands and you
| can expect this to stay free.
| sevensor wrote:
| > A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the
| mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to
| private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or
| repurposed for commercial gain
|
| Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we
| might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think
| terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think
| we're ok.
| geophph wrote:
| Terminals are the next bubble to burst
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I had an xterm in the 90s that had a gl-
| accelerated burst for screen clear.
| ykonstant wrote:
| The CLIpocalypse is coming!
| maccard wrote:
| > Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled
| by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status,
|
| The situations aren't comparable.
|
| OpenAI was a non-profit foundation that held a controlling
| share in a for-profit organisation. It's model is based around
| controlling access to their data (which was never open), and
| controlling access to their models (which are also not open).
|
| If Ghostty does sets up a for-profit org with the NFP as the
| majority holder then we can have the conversation, but even at
| that fork + move on (like OpenTofu, Valkey, CentOS, MariaDB,
| Jenkins) is an option.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Your right! Strange. I thought I commented this to the Seattle
| thread... bug?
| aroman wrote:
| Did you post this comment on the wrong article? Nothing here
| has anything to do with AI whatsoever.
| xrd wrote:
| I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my
| exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered
| that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even
| startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the
| good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my
| head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for
| these new CLIs.
|
| (UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
| TheRoque wrote:
| I'm curious as to why you are so excited ? What makes Ghostty
| so special ? (Especially compared to Kitty or Wezterm which I
| use)
| alwillis wrote:
| WezTerm was my daily driver for a long time--it's a great
| app.
|
| Ghostty is blazing fast and the attention to detail is
| fabulous.
|
| The theme picker is next level, for example; so are the
| typographical controls.
|
| It feels like an app made by a craftsman at the top of his
| game.
| PNewling wrote:
| Wow, I actually had no idea what he was a UW grad, let alone
| that I went there the same time he did... TIL
| mitchellh wrote:
| I did a for-profit course registration tool called uwrobot
| too if you or any of your friends were customers of that...
| simonw wrote:
| Inspired by this I just posted a resonably niche feature request
| to the Ghostty discussion forum (copy and paste to support
| text/rtf)... and found out within half an hour that the
| equivalent of what I was asking for was already available on
| their main branch: https://github.com/ghostty-
| org/ghostty/discussions/9798
| arjie wrote:
| Mitchell Hashimoto is a real programmer in the old vein. It's
| lovely to see him succeed. Ghostty is fantastic to use.
|
| There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that
| business you were just giving things away and never got to reap
| the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out
| how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way.
|
| Love to see it.
| catlover76 wrote:
| I always found the fact that he named a company after himself
| to be pretty off-putting, personally
|
| Also, didn't said company piss people off in some way that led
| to Open Tofu being created?
| defen wrote:
| Dell, HP, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Ford...it's not exactly
| unheard of to name your company after yourself.
| caseyohara wrote:
| Exactly. A huge number of household brands are named after
| people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_nam
| ed_after_...
| cholantesh wrote:
| IIRC, he was on his way out by the time the BSL shenanigans
| were underway.
| ceocoder wrote:
| Ferrari, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini, Tata, Honda, Toyota,
| Wal-Mart, Zuora (named after the two founders), Garmin (also
| named after the two founders).
| Fnoord wrote:
| Or it shows the person stands behind their company, and isn't
| shy to take the responsibility.
| davidsainez wrote:
| Ever heard of Debian or Linux?
| flaviolivolsi wrote:
| Linux was named Freax by Linus, but other people didn't
| like it and started calling it Linux and it just stuck
| Vinnl wrote:
| And Git :)
| mstade wrote:
| I don't know the specifics of naming that particular company,
| but being the majority stakeholder of two companies myself I
| can tell you that naming companies is just as hard as naming
| things in programming. Both of my companies are named after
| myself, one directly so and the other being a portmanteau of
| my business partner's and my names.
|
| It had very little to do with self aggrandizing and more to
| do with the tax authorities need a name and time was limited.
| The names were used mostly as placeholders and then stuck.
| Branding is hard.
| wpm wrote:
| Hashicorp is a good name though it'd be hard to pass up
| osigurdson wrote:
| He mentioned in an interview Hashicorp was just a corporate
| entity that he used as a teenager to do some contracting here
| and there. He and the other founder weren't that keen on
| using it but the name stuck.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Charles Schwab has written (my memory) that putting one's
| name on the business stakes its reputation there, and such a
| business is theoretically more trustworthy.
| jeron wrote:
| hashicorp made him a billionaire, ghostty is really more of a
| pet project lol
| tolerance wrote:
| Is anyone opposed or at least of two minds concerning what could
| be described as the bureaucratization of FOSS?
|
| Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common--and
| celebrated--outcome for a lot of projects.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Ever heard of the Free Software Foundation? Apache Software
| Foundation? FreeBSD Foundation? Linux Foundation?
| akho wrote:
| xterm foundation, the urxvt conglomerate, foot collective
| farm, the ministry of alacritty, the 9term imperium
|
| st corporation when
| chrysoprace wrote:
| Non-profits allow projects to grow beyond hobbies. Covering
| costs (whether that's the expense of hosting / running the
| project or hiring talented people to work on it) is going to be
| a better incentive to keep the projects alive in the long term,
| meaning that people can rely on them instead of being wary that
| the project might become abandonware in a year.
| xpe wrote:
| > I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a
| mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public
| benefit over private profit.
|
| One of my pet peeves is people trotting out "I believe"
| statements. (Usually) I care much more about the evidence that
| backs the belief than the belief.
|
| Putting aside my cantankerousness, I am glad Michael believes in
| setting up good incentives for the organization that will manage
| Ghostty. (But being glad right now doesn't count for much.)
|
| At a deeper level, my more precise complaint is people
| broadcasting "I believe" statements as if doing so should
| persuade us. It should not. "I believe" statements may often be
| personal and genuine, but they are so easily abused that perhaps
| they should be enumerated among the dark patterns of rhetoric.
|
| (There are some ridiculous quote from the first episode of
| Silicon Valley by Mike Judge that pokes fun at the zealotry
| behind belief, but I can't quote it off the top of my head.)
|
| In the case of software projects with broad benefits that want
| continuity over a long period of time, I _want_ to agree that the
| not-for-profit structure is a good choice and often than the
| alternatives. But I don't know that this has been carefully
| studied.
|
| My hunch would be there are stronger causal predictors such as
| governance mechanisms. Choosing an organization form is just step
| one. Smart governance, and long-term execution can only be shown
| with time.
|
| Individuals with unaligned incentives will challenge any
| organization's set of rules. In the same way that our immune
| system has to evolve over time to win, organizational rules at
| all levels have to evolve.
|
| Also, I do think there's a lot of opportunity for smarter legal
| structures after the machinations pulled by OpenAI.
| xpe wrote:
| It seems likely that some people have perceived what I wrote
| above as some kind of criticism of Ghostty or that it is now
| funded by a non-profit. That would be a misunderstanding [1].
|
| Personally -- for context, not to be confused with an argument-
| from-authority -- I've worked in the not-for-profit sector (3+
| orgs) as well as studying how to make it work better. There are
| people with immensely more knowledge than I, and I have learned
| from them, and I respect the lessons they try to convey.
|
| In case it puts people at ease, yes, I want Ghostty to succeed.
| I tend to agree that a not-for-profit home is likely be a good
| choice, especially relative to an alternative where it might be
| mostly reliant on one person and/or beholden to corporate
| interests.
|
| So what I am saying, at core? More or less: this is probably a
| good start but only a start. I am suggesting more awareness of:
|
| 1. There is a psychological tendency for people to _believe_
| others who express more confidence. Being aware of this helps
| us notice it and prefer evidence over statements of belief.
|
| 2. What does evidence show about making OSS project succeed?
| Giving it a not-for-profit home seems like a good start, but
| how important is this relative to other choices? What does the
| evidence show?
|
| To mention one place to start, here is a open-access article
| from the ACM that I skimmed: "Open Source Software
| Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-
| Technical Networks" [2] However, I didn't find it particularly
| useful in answering my #2 question above. Also the paper seemed
| mostly to promote a method of analysis but didn't drive towards
| actionable nor causal recommendations.
|
| [1]: Maybe the misunderstanding comes from one or more of the
| following?
|
| (a) halo effect (e.g. "Michael is a good guy, your words imply
| an indirect criticism of him");
|
| (b) tribalism (e.g. "you are either with us or against us");
|
| (c) timing-oriented (e.g. "this is not the time to be critical;
| this is a time to be jolly.");
|
| (d) past success implies future results (e.g. "Hack Club has
| done well so far, trust them");
|
| (e) tone-policing (e.g. "You seem grumpy, dude");
|
| (f) feeling lectured-at (e.g. "You seem to act like you know
| things we don't.")
|
| All of these possibilities would involve a some degree of
| presumption about what is appropriate and some level of
| disengagement with the _substance_ of what I 'm writing.
| Remember, we have a big tent here with room for many different
| points of view.
|
| [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555129
| Copenjin wrote:
| > A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the
| mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to
| private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed
| for commercial gain.
|
| What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused
| guys
| dizhn wrote:
| No way! You need to incorporate a whole other company for that.
| By the way, it's a terminal emulator. I think we'll be fine if
| they pull the rug.
| Copenjin wrote:
| Yeah, no doubt considering it's Hashimoto and considering the
| project, it was just a joke on what OpenAI did with their
| non-profit.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| "A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the
| mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to
| private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed
| for commercial gain. The structure legally binds Ghostty to the
| public-benefit purpose it was created to serve."
|
| I mean, after the OpenAI debacle, surely this type of assurance
| doesn't hold much weight anymore? (Though Ghostty is ofc very
| unlikely to pull shenanigans)
| itarmonkey wrote:
| we got hack club sponsorship in HS. Sanil chawla is a great guy
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Hey articles like this could get some value with a two liner
| about what the tool is, tty can mean several things, so clearly
| stating its function would help gain additional users that aren't
| already familiar with your product :)
| mmaunder wrote:
| Thanks for doing this Mitchell, if you're on here, and for
| contributing to open source. Donated.
| neural_thing wrote:
| Donating in Chrome didn't work, only in Safari.
|
| FullStory namespace conflict. Please set window["_fs_namespace"].
| script.pageview-props.tagged-events.js:1 Failed to load resource:
| net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error
| edge.fullstory.com/s/fs.js:1 Failed to load resource:
| net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error ghostty:1 Access
| to XMLHttpRequest at
| 'https://d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-...'
| from origin 'https://hcb.hackclub.com' has been blocked by CORS
| policy: Request header field beacon-device-instance-id is not
| allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Headers in preflight
| response.Understand this error installHook.js:1 Unable to Load
| Beacon overrideMethod @ installHook.js:1Understand this error
| installHook.js:1 $ overrideMethod @ installHook.js:1Understand
| this error d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-8f
| 8b-be1e33945bab:1 Failed to load resource:
| net::ERR_FAILEDUnderstand this error [Violation] Potential
| permissions policy violation: payment is not allowed in this
| document.Understand this error rs.fullstory.com/rec/page:1 Failed
| to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error
| 29[Intervention] Unable to preventDefault inside passive event
| listener due to target being treated as passive. See <URL>
| garyhtou wrote:
| Hi there! Gary here from HCB (Hack Club's fiscal sponsorship
| program).
|
| Sorry about that! I've just pushed a fix for one of those
| errors. Although I wasn't able to reproduce this donation
| behavior on Chrome, I will continue investigating.
|
| I appreciate you reporting this!
| vegabook wrote:
| This is also good news for Zig.
| rogeliodh wrote:
| Is the Zig Software Foundation in good shape?
| alphazard wrote:
| I have yet to see a way that this software is better than leading
| terminal emulators like Alacritty and WezTerm. Alacritty is
| simple and blazing fast, WezTerm has a Lua API and is as
| complicated as you want it to be.
|
| All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout,
| and maybe some interest in Zig. Given that's the real reason
| everyone is talking about Ghostty (which I'm happy to be wrong
| about, let me know), It raises the question: Is crowding out
| other projects in a space, so that a billionaire can have a side
| project, really something we should be excited about? Unless the
| software is actually good, it seems like this is just an
| attention suck away from better software that could use it.
| maccard wrote:
| Alacritty is "barebones" and doesn't have modern features
| like... tabs.
|
| Wezterm fits the vim/emacs bill of "make it whatever you want".
| I want something in between - iTerm2 for 2025. Stuff like
| secure input on macOS is something that is just nice - it
| behaves like a real platform app and not jsut the lowest common
| denominator loosely ported.
|
| They say in the docs it's not the best at anything, but it's
| competitive in performance, features, and extensibility and
| that combo is a winner for me (personally)
| dmytrokow wrote:
| > Alacritty is "barebones" and doesn't have modern features
| like... tabs.
|
| It does. And the barebones complaint is literally funny (I'm
| mentally giggling) because Ghostty didn't have modern
| features like... search, literally 4 days ago
| https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9756
|
| That's why I'm staying on Alacritty on my company mac.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Alacritty didn't even have scrollback for years.
|
| Alacritty's search is less useful than Ghostty's
| implementation as it you have to exit search mode to do
| anything else.
| skywhopper wrote:
| This is a terrible comment. Everyone should use the terminal
| that works for them and anyone who wants to write a terminal
| should do so. Ghostty is great. I've heard Alacritty is great.
| alphazard wrote:
| This doesn't engage with my comment at all other than to say
| that you personally found it unpleasant.
|
| If it's true that Alacritty and Ghostty are both great,
| Alacritty must be some different kind of great because it has
| a large number of users due only to its own merits, and not
| due to the online following of the author.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Your whole comment is predicated on the idea that the
| software isn't actually good. However it is, so the rest of
| it doesn't make sense.
| spott wrote:
| Libghostty is a pretty huge contribution.
| alwillis wrote:
| > All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's
| clout, and maybe some interest in Zig.
|
| Nope, that's not it.
|
| It's mostly because he noticed the majority of terminal
| applications were okay but not great. So he decides to address
| this by creating a cross-platform terminal app that's faster
| and more compatible than pretty much every existing terminal
| app. And has a native macOS UI written in Swift without
| compromising its cross-platform features.
|
| Kind of out of nowhere, Ghostty is in the conversation of being
| the best terminal app available. "Best" doesn't mean the most
| features; but it nails speed and compatibility. (I'd love to
| see iTerm switch to using libghostty in the near future. That
| would be a killer combination!)
|
| From "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant
| Champions": [1]
|
| _Before presenting the latest results, Ghostty warrants
| particular attention, not only because it scored the highest
| among all terminals tested, but that it was publicly released
| only this year by Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a significant
| advancement. Developed from scratch in Zig, the Unicode support
| implementation is thoroughly correct_
|
| _In 2023, Mitchell published Grapheme Clusters and Terminal
| Emulators, demonstrating a commitment to understanding and
| implementing the fundamentals. His recent announcement of
| libghostty provides a welcome alternative to libvte,
| potentially enabling a new generation of terminals on a
| foundation of strong Unicode support._
|
| [1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-
| emulation-2...
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| For me, Alacritty and Foot do not support ligatures, Kitty does
| now but I personally find the maintainers behaviour a bit
| abrasive. Wezterm is great but I found it noticeably slow in
| some (dumb) instances -- eg 144fps rendering of games, input
| latency and had issues on wayland at some point.
|
| Dunno if that makes Ghostty "better" than other terminals,
| probably not. It just ticks the boxes of ligatures, fast,
| integration with wayland, simple amount of configuration to
| work how I want. It also seemed to have a focus on
| "correctness" which I appreciate. I don't use any of the
| tab/ssh/whatever features. I know ligatures are the new vi-vs-
| emacs religious war. Without that single feature-request, I'd
| probably just use foot. Swapping terminal also isn't that hard,
| it'd easily swap to something else if it gave me a reason.
|
| I do think its reasonable to question focus on a millionaires
| toy with a large social presence vs other projects, helped by
| the somewhat --if not _intentional_ , at least side-effecting
| -- hype-focused release style of Ghostty. Would it be nearly as
| successful if it were released anonymously at a 1.0? Probably
| not? Maybe? It does score highly in sort of arbitrary feature &
| performance benchmarks so it would probably still have a number
| of users without the name attached.
| caniszczyk wrote:
| If you ever wanted a home for Ghostty at the Linux Foundation for
| more support, we'd happily work with you and your community:
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/hosting
| bilekas wrote:
| After hearing about Bun today, this is such a curveball. Ironic
| as it is in this 'get big enough to sell' ethos mentality that
| seems to be prevalent, this is what I would have expected from
| Bun.
|
| I like Ghostty, don't get a chance to use it enough but everyone
| I know loves it, this is so cool to hear.
|
| > Being non-profit clearly demonstrates our commitment to keeping
| Ghostty free and open source for everyone
|
| I do hope the creators and maintainers get something good though.
| Open source work seems majority ignored to me at least, and
| admittedly by me too most of the time.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > this is what I would have expected from Bun
|
| Alas, Bun is a VC-backed startup. Having $7m in funding is
| great, but it does come with some strings attached.
|
| But maybe now Bun founders can start a nonprofit project of
| their own!
| throwaway1389z wrote:
| It is amazing how Mitchell here talks about Rug-Pull after what
| his HashiCorp did with Terraform.
| notpushkin wrote:
| It was after the acquisition, no?
|
| I mean, yeah, you can argue that he knew it would happen, but
| this way:
|
| - he has $6B he can spend on other projects
|
| - we have OpenTofu under LF governance, backed by virtually
| everybody who was using Terraform before
|
| Win-win?
| shevy-java wrote:
| Can someone translate this for me? I understand he explained the
| rationale. I am not sure I understood it though.
|
| The biggest question I have right now is: why does it matter that
| a terminal is a non-profit? I think I am missing some pieces of
| the puzzle right now.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| Imagine you have a thriving, successful open source project
| with many users. Eventually, you want to move on to other
| things, but you don't want the project to die, or to be
| absorbed into AWS. Furthermore, you have a bunch of
| contributors who could really use financial support in order to
| sustain their efforts. What's your strategy?
| akho wrote:
| I don't know. What are other terminal emulators doing?
| RustSupremacist wrote:
| This highlights the value of having non-profits as a 501(c)(3).
| The transparency about Hack Club is refreshing.
|
| The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust
| Foundation would do better for the community if they were a
| 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this
| example for the greater good.
| jyunwai wrote:
| More context: 501(c)(3) orgs are non-profits that include
| charities, whereas 501(c)(6) orgs are non-profits with less
| strict requirements. Both are tax-exempt federally, but 501(c)
| orgs have higher financial transparency requirements and higher
| restrictions on political activity (which qualifies donations
| to 501(c)s as tax-deductible).
| yannoninator wrote:
| > The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The
| Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were
| a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this
| example for the greater good.
|
| This was exactly my issue with the Rust Foundation back in 2021
| when it was formed, 501(c)(6) are for trade organisations. To
| this day, individuals still CANNOT donate to the Rust
| Foundation which means it is not community led.
|
| > Note: At this time, the Rust Foundation [still] does not
| offer individual memberships.
|
| https://rustfoundation.org/get-involved/#donations
|
| The main issue of the Rust Foundation is that makes it easy for
| companies to buy influence in the project by buying a board
| seat as a benefit.
|
| I agree that the Rust Foundation should change their governance
| structure to a 501(c)(3) instead of a 501(c)(6).
| lillecarl wrote:
| I really hope Mitchell will continue the work of Kovid Goyal in
| extending and improving the VT protocols to allow building richer
| terminal experiences.
|
| https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/unscroll/ <- this for example
| makes such a difference when using multiple splits and some TUI
| style history search or whatever to unscroll.
| thewtf wrote:
| What exactly is the appeal of Ghostty? It doesn't seem to offer
| anything new and it consumes more memory than other options.
| jtokoph wrote:
| Someone just made an anonymous $10,000 donation!
| udev4096 wrote:
| Says the billionaire founder, cmon
| danilafe wrote:
| I keep seeing Ghostty in the news, and I've tried it, but it
| feels like just another terminal emulator to men. This coming
| from someone who spends 90% of the workday in the terminal.
|
| Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special
| about Ghostty compared to alternatives?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Here is the full about page it: https://ghostty.org/docs/about
|
| Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more)
| popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker
| who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust
| could attract more attention.)
| jwr wrote:
| It's just better in every way than anything else I have ever
| tried (at least on a Mac). The author cares and it shows.
|
| BTW, I recently discovered shaders and cursor_blaze is
| absolutely awesome.
| eviks wrote:
| It would be helpful if you actually listed the ways and the
| else
| jwr wrote:
| Yes, it would.
| agos wrote:
| For one, it's way faster than both iTerm and terminal.app,
| the two most used terminal apps on MacOS
| blazinglyfast wrote:
| Have you tried kitty?
| cess11 wrote:
| It's good at what it does. Starts quickly, doesn't get bogged
| down when dumping large amounts of text into it, got some nice
| themes.
|
| I find it a bit messy to build but I'm not exactly a compile
| binaries kind of person anymore so it's probably a good sign
| that I still manage to figure it out. If stuff like Zig is your
| thing you'll probably enjoy this part.
|
| My main terminal emulator is the bog slow but reliable
| Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3
| commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.
| cbolton wrote:
| Ghostty is quite slow to start on my Linux machine, very
| close the the first start of GNOME Terminal (or Terminator).
| Maybe because I'm on Wayland? Are you on X?
| 59nadir wrote:
| I had this issue a few years ago with certain applications
| and came to find out that it had to do specifically with
| them using GTK. I googled for it and found the fix, and
| after all the same apps started practically instantly.
| Could this be what you're running into?
|
| (I haven't used ghostty so I wouldn't know whether it's
| actually fast to start up, but what you wrote reminded me
| about this particular issue.)
| novella_rel wrote:
| To me it has a couple advantages over the other options on the
| market.
|
| 1. Feels 'native' and is built for each platform. This means I
| can use for example familiar right click context menu's and
| tabs that I find on every other app. I have the option to use
| the mouse as well as the keyboard which I appreciate.
|
| 2. It has sensible defaults with a "Zero Configuration
| Philosophy" meaning that many of the things I would usually
| need to fiddle with are already set.
|
| 3. It performs comparably to advanced terminal emulators such
| as kitty.
|
| The combination of all three (and especially the first) is why
| I use it.
| Vinnl wrote:
| What's an example of a thing you usually need to fiddle with?
| I feel like 1 and 3 are already true for my existing native
| terminal emulators, which I also never configure. So
| presumably there are things Ghostty does that aren't enabled
| by default on my other ones that I could take advantage of?
| Gormo wrote:
| I tried it a few months ago, and didn't perceive any of those
| items as particular benefits.
|
| 1. Terminal emulators that feel 'native' are ubiquitous.
| Sure, there are also a lot that have idiosyncratic UIs, but
| I'm not generally using those -- my go-to when working within
| a GUI environment is xfce4-terminal, which is about as native
| as I can imagine, given that I'm using XFCE as my primary
| desktop environment.
|
| 2. Sensible defaults may be good for _new_ users, but I
| already have my terminal emulators configured exactly as I
| like them, and my benchmark for switching from one tool to
| another within the same category isn 't how welcoming it is
| to novice users out of the box, it's how easily I can adjust
| its configuration to match my long-established preferences.
| The "zero configuration" philosophy is actually a detriment
| here, as it leads to configurability being obscured to some
| extent.
|
| 3. When I tested it, its performance was worse than
| xfce4-terminal, both objectively and subjectively. Its memory
| consumption was higher and it felt laggier in responding to
| input.
| kombine wrote:
| I've been using Kitty terminal and they are absolutely
| comparable in the feature set: GPU-based rendering, speed,
| customisation. OS-native controls in Ghostty are not very
| important to me, I like terminal being a terminal, not a GUI.
| theasisa wrote:
| I've been using Tabby on MacOS but Kitty looks neat, I'll
| give it a go. Thanks for mentioning it!
| alexalx666 wrote:
| ghostty is faster than kitty (MBP M4 Max), I did not expect
| that
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I used iTerm2 a lot, configured it to my liking, but then I
| tried Ghostty for curiosity and for some reason I sticked to
| it. I think it's just cleaner and leaner and the default looks
| pretty cool and minimalistic, I don't really miss anything from
| iTerm.
|
| Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid
| one that just works.
| srcreigh wrote:
| I like that ghostty supports bitmap fonts. Kitty doesn't (and
| won't) support those.
|
| I also like the "ghostty +list-themes" command and the splash
| page animation on their site.
| stephenr wrote:
| Oh good. Thank fuck that one of the dozens if not hundreds of
| terminal emulators isn't going to be a "rug pull".
|
| It's a completely fucked situation when it happens to fairly
| unique/obscure software like say Terraform or Packer or Vagrant.
|
| But if it happened to some software that's so common it's
| literally competing against built in apps on every desktop OS, I
| just don't know what I'd ever do
|
| /s for anyone who needs it.
| eviks wrote:
| > but a non-profit structure allows others to contribute
| financially without fear of misappropriation or misuse of funds
| (as protected by legal requirements and oversight from the fiscal
| sponsor).
|
| None of the parenthesised provide any strong guarantees against
| these to alleviate such fears, are there not enough non-profits
| that misuse funds, say, on too high of an executive compensation
| instead of product development?
| lionkor wrote:
| The fiscal sponsor (Hack Club) is a sponsor to many projects,
| and they presumably do keep an eye on the finances.
| eviks wrote:
| Why would you presume that? Especially given what it is:
|
| > We are teen hackers from around the world who code together
|
| (besides, "many projects" is more likely a downside here as
| it spreads the oversight resources)
| lionkor wrote:
| For sure not perfect, but I would simply expect them to
| care and have an occasional look, which is a lot more than
| nothing.
|
| Teen hackers, yes. Incompetent or neglectful, absolutely
| not.
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| This is just a terminal emulator right?
| StrLght wrote:
| Yes, it is. It's so wild to see this.
|
| For years people didn't care that much about specific terminal
| emulators or opinionated dotfiles. Now projects like Ghostty
| and Omarchy get tons of attention.
|
| I get that it's probably not the projects themselves, but
| rather authors behind them. I'm also not saying that these
| projects are bad -- they could be good. I don't use them, so I
| wouldn't know. It's just discouraging, seeing that other
| similar projects don't and probably won't get that traction.
| lvl155 wrote:
| There aren't that many people like Mitchell. He exited Hashicorp
| and most people would just do typical Zuck things. For him to
| still have motivation to make Ghostty from scratch and Zig of all
| things. The guy is a coder through and through.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I thought I'll give it a try - looks great but found it takes
| longer to start than konsole so back to the latter.
| bmitc wrote:
| Does anyone have a suggestion for a minimal but functional
| Ghostty configuration for tab completion?
|
| I'm using it on macOS, and I encounter a lot of issues with
| Ghostty with Oh My Zsh. It's often very slow, the shell crashes,
| and there's often a lot of display issues. I don't know if this
| is Ghostty or Oh My Zsh or what, so I'm just looking for a good
| setup that is as close to the stock Ghostty as possible.
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