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 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/
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 11827×13107 “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.)
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!
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.
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.
Ferrari, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini, Tata, Honda, Toyota, Wal-Mart, Zuora (named after the two founders), Garmin (also named after the two founders).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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)
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
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.
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...
"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.
> 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.
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)
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)
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. :)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
(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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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?
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-8f8b-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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! )
> 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?
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
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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)
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)
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.
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.
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!
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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™
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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
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 ?
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.
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
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
"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)
> 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.
I would ask that you more carefully and neutrally reread my comment. Your questions do not match up with what I actually wrote. You seem to have injected your own uncharitable interpretations rather than commenting on what I wrote? This wastes everyone’s time and is against HN guidelines.
I don’t appreciate your sarcastic and snarky final penultimate sentence. If you reread my comment, you probably can see that I would agree there is no one perfect legal entity.
> Why do you assume Mitchell is just doing this without any research or reasoning?
I said nothing of the kind.
> Your laundry list of everything that might possibly go wrong with an open software project is not exactly useful.
I didn’t make any such laundry list (or even a list).
Saying “… that only you can see. Enjoy!” at the end of this is more than unkind; it is a jerk move.
Taken as a whole, the comment above isn’t just uncharitable; it mischaracterizes my comment completely and consistently.
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...
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/
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.
Seconding this. I pivoted to tech in my early 30s and feel I've missed out on a lot of community building opportunities.
Recurse Center might be a good option https://www.recurse.com
I would second Recurse Center. I've heard universally great things!
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
My city is on the list but when I submit I get a 404
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
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.
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?....
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.
You already made the point but yea that’s overly jaded to a significant degree
Yeah, I get suspicious when schools say only minors can enroll there
> 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)
I do not speak for the 'club, but I believe it was resolved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292042
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.
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...
MMW: this will likely end up being the SVB for nonprofits
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.
> 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 11827×13107 “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.)
and as with most things in Hack Club... it's open source :)
https://github.com/hackclub/hcb/issues/12314
Just let them know (admittedly not through a previously known reliable channel FYI, I’m a stranger)
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
Hack Club was featured on front page not long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663
It might have improved since then?
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.
hashicorp made him a billionaire, ghostty is really more of a pet project lol
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?
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.
Ferrari, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini, Tata, Honda, Toyota, Wal-Mart, Zuora (named after the two founders), Garmin (also named after the two founders).
Dell, HP, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Ford...it's not exactly unheard of to name your company after yourself.
Exactly. A huge number of household brands are named after people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_...
[dead]
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.
Ever heard of Debian or Linux?
Linux was named Freax by Linus, but other people didn't like it and started calling it Linux and it just stuck
And Git :)
Or it shows the person stands behind their company, and isn't shy to take the responsibility.
Hashicorp is a good name though it’d be hard to pass up
IIRC, he was on his way out by the time the BSL shenanigans were underway.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Tres Commas!
I didn't think it was possible for anyone to express this thought more obnoxiously than DHH but here we are.
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.
Is DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) worth 100M USD? Google results say he is worth about 50M USD... so "only" two commas.
Three comma club is for billionaires.
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.
>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.
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
There are a ton of different projects one can devote free work to. Eventually one will get bored and want to change things up.
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.
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)
But when you already have money, you can skip the “how can I work on this and not starve to death?” part.
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
IBM did not do that, HashiCorp was a public company before their acquisition.
I'd rather he'd still be working on Nomad to be honest, but Ghostty is a good consolation prize ;)
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.
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...
"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.
Side projects that aren't a conflict of interest when working at Google is rather limiting. Likely less so for small companies.
Not really, in my personal experience and per my friends, most of big companies are pretty lenient about it, except for Apple.
As long as you don't use their hardware to do it.
that goes without saying, but it's still not free permission when you use your own stuff.
> 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.
Good. Maybe they'll add search to the terminal now. /s
https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 - "Ghostty on macOS now has search [...] GTK to follow soon" - November 26th 2025
GTK is also merged. Main branch has search. Its also exposed via libghostty for embedders.
But only in the the tip (nightly) build. I'm somewhat tempted to switch to them for this.
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.
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.
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...
Ah. Cool!
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...
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)
Ghostty 1.3 will release in March.
"sustainable foundation" it's still one guy funding it, no? seems as sustainable as before
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. :)
33 additional people funding it as of this announcement: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.)
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.
I've been using Tabby on MacOS but Kitty looks neat, I'll give it a go. Thanks for mentioning it!
ghostty is faster than kitty (MBP M4 Max), I did not expect that
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.
It would be helpful if you actually listed the ways and the else
For one, it’s way faster than both iTerm and terminal.app, the two most used terminal apps on MacOS
Yes, it would.
Have you tried kitty?
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.
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.
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?
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)
Wow, I actually had no idea what he was a UW grad, let alone that I went there the same time he did... TIL
I did a for-profit course registration tool called uwrobot too if you or any of your friends were customers of that...
I'm curious as to why you are so excited ? What makes Ghostty so special ? (Especially compared to Kitty or Wezterm which I use)
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Terminals are the next bubble to burst
I’m pretty sure I had an xterm in the 90s that had a gl-accelerated burst for screen clear.
The CLIpocalypse is coming!
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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
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.
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.
How does Windows without such force to contribute code back have better drivers?
> 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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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).
> 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?
The fiscal sponsor (Hack Club) is a sponsor to many projects, and they presumably do keep an eye on the finances.
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)
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.
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-8f8b-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>
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!
I thought I'll give it a try - looks great but found it takes longer to start than konsole so back to the latter.
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.
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.
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
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! )
> 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?
> don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire.
The entire point of this post is that the money is not going to him.
Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?
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.
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
- 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.
the edit is not true. footclient is, like, right there.
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.
It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.
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.
One fun thing, it supports shaders: https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
No sign of alacritty :(
Have you read the post you linked, and do you understand what it is about?
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.
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.
They're all native applications.
Wezterm is an excellent project but it doesn't have native UI chrome like Ghostty does.
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.
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.
Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.
The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit as well.
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!
You can set a keyboard shortcut for that GUI menu entry (and most others) in macOS system settings.
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)
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
Can you not bind the command "open ." to a keybind through Ghostty?
Wrong direction. OP wants to open Ghostty from a Finder window, not vice versa.
I think they are looking for the opposite: open a Ghostty window from Finder.
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)
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.
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.
> 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!
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!
Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer over the Mac's Terminal, for example?
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
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.
One personal gripe: Compared to the default terminal, ghostty, close the terminal on ctrl+d.
Good. That weird “keep the window open after ctrl+d” behavior is annoying.
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
People use something other than CTRL-D to exit their terminal?
Command-Q? Or command-W to close only the current window.
Yes, of course, many people use the same shortcut for the same action in all the apps
i type exit
Same. I didn't know Ctrl-D did anything.
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)
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
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.
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.
This is just a terminal emulator right?
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.
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™
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
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
adding this should also do the trick: shell-integration-features = ssh-env
oh my god this was it. thank you!! (i never fixed it but im going to now!)
i agree, you can search in the terminal like you can iterm2 either, which is super annoying.
It’s merged to main but not in any district channels yet AFAIK
This is also good news for Zig.
Is the Zig Software Foundation in good shape?
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.
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?
I don't know. What are other terminal emulators doing?
> 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
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.
Yeah, no doubt considering it's Hashimoto and considering the project, it was just a joke on what OpenAI did with their non-profit.
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 ?
It's not an alternative to tmux, it's an alternative to the macOS Terminal.app or iTerm2.
You can run tmux inside Ghostty.
To be fair, you can also run tmux inside tmux (inside Zellij, inside another tmux, inside screen, etc). :)
For those who will read this literally, it works fine on linux as well.
It's a terminal, not a multiplexer. Different type of product.
tmux is another terminal layer inside of any terminal.
Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.
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.
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
"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.
Someone just made an anonymous $10,000 donation!
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.
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.
tres commas and doors that go like this
chad
Ha. That counts the cents, though, I assume? I didn't think Hashicorp was that big, right?
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.
Shockingly I believe billionaire with a B. They timed the acquisition nearly perfect in terms of market conditions. Tres comma club!!!
Loving the idea that he got a bank transfer for $1b and it’s still just sitting there in his checking account.
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.
was that big
Smart decision and makes sense.
Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned.
Reminds me of Signal.
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.
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.
Libghostty is a pretty huge contribution.
> 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...
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for doing this Mitchell, if you're on here, and for contributing to open source. Donated.
What exactly is the appeal of Ghostty? It doesn’t seem to offer anything new and it consumes more memory than other options.
we got hack club sponsorship in HS. Sanil chawla is a great guy
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.
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.
Ever heard of the Free Software Foundation? Apache Software Foundation? FreeBSD Foundation? Linux Foundation?
xterm foundation, the urxvt conglomerate, foot collective farm, the ministry of alacritty, the 9term imperium
st corporation when
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 :)
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.
Says the billionaire founder, cmon
...and another $150k from my family...
Wow.
Not to dismiss the generosity, but he's a billionaire.
A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.
"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)
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
> 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.
[flagged]
I would ask that you more carefully and neutrally reread my comment. Your questions do not match up with what I actually wrote. You seem to have injected your own uncharitable interpretations rather than commenting on what I wrote? This wastes everyone’s time and is against HN guidelines.
I don’t appreciate your sarcastic and snarky final penultimate sentence. If you reread my comment, you probably can see that I would agree there is no one perfect legal entity.
> Why do you assume Mitchell is just doing this without any research or reasoning?
I said nothing of the kind.
> Your laundry list of everything that might possibly go wrong with an open software project is not exactly useful.
I didn’t make any such laundry list (or even a list).
Saying “… that only you can see. Enjoy!” at the end of this is more than unkind; it is a jerk move.
Taken as a whole, the comment above isn’t just uncharitable; it mischaracterizes my comment completely and consistently.
Your right! Strange. I thought I commented this to the Seattle thread… bug?
Did you post this comment on the wrong article? Nothing here has anything to do with AI whatsoever.
It is amazing how Mitchell here talks about Rug-Pull after what his HashiCorp did with Terraform.
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?