8 ms·

Ghostty is now non-profit

1343 points by vrnvu 10mo ago

rvz 10mo ago
Smart decision and makes sense. Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned. Reminds me of Signal.
simonw 10mo ago
I wasn't aware of Hack Club before and wow, their fiscal sponsorship program is enormous: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/ 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/ 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-software-foundation/#acting-as-a-fiscal-sponsor https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...
- conradev 10mo ago
  Hack Club builds software, so the students naturally built a banking product to scale their fiscal sponsorship: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client (https://github.com/hackclub/burrow 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/ https://hackclub.com/slack/
  - torben-friis 10mo ago
    This community sounds amazing, is there anything similar for adults rather than teens? The “understanding through building” mentality is something I never got to experience as a group, the obvious answer is open source and the like but I wonder if there’s something more learning oriented.
    - mellowyeller 10mo ago
      Seconding this. I pivoted to tech in my early 30s and feel I've missed out on a lot of community building opportunities.
      - leetrout 10mo ago
        Recurse Center might be a good option https://www.recurse.com https://www.recurse.com
        conradev 10mo ago
        I would second Recurse Center. I've heard universally great things!
        rrampage 10mo ago
        Recurse center is awesome! The community is curious, kind and supportive. I did 2 batches there and each one expanded my horizons as a programmer.
      - abnercoimbre 10mo ago
        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 https://handmadecities.com/meetups
        MrChoke 10mo ago
        My city is on the list but when I submit I get a 404
        abnercoimbre 10mo ago
        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
  - CactusBlue 10mo ago
    MMW: this will likely end up being the SVB for nonprofits
    - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
      They're using Column (https://column.com/ https://column.com/) under the hood, so more like Stripe (payments + Atlas) for non profits I think? Still very powerful and material value of course on top of the banking partner primitive.
  - sundarurfriend 10mo ago
    > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887)
    - deleted 10mo ago
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    - deleted 10mo ago
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    - conradev 10mo ago
      I do not speak for the 'club, but I believe it was resolved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292042
      - sundarurfriend 10mo ago
        Yes, as I mentioned, Slack made a U-turn after the thread got popular and became a PR disaster (after having ignored the issue again and again previously). That kind of behaviour indicates a service that shouldn't be relied on so much, at least not without low-friction alternates that you keep ready to jump onto, in case some exec there decides again that the Club is too tempting a prize to not attempt another squeeze.
  - dannyobrien 10mo ago
    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-future https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-f...
- garyhtou 10mo ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802), and we just launched a mobile app yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402
- throwaway290 10mo ago
  Hack Club was featured on front page not long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 It might have improved since then?
  - dragonsenseiguy 10mo ago
    Yes, they have hired a lawyer. Also, as part of Hack Club it is an incredible place, meeting like minded people, participation in hackathons, member run programs like YSWS(You Ship We Ship) and much more!
- deleted 10mo ago
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- chrismorgan 10mo ago
  > their fiscal sponsorship program is enormous: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/ 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.)
  - Barbing 10mo ago
    Just let them know (admittedly not through a previously known reliable channel FYI, I’m a stranger)
  - conradev 10mo ago
    and as with most things in Hack Club... it's open source :) https://github.com/hackclub/hcb/issues/12314 https://github.com/hackclub/hcb/issues/12314
- dragonsenseiguy 10mo ago
  It's incredible! HCB is a member run project where teens can also make their own non profits! Even Hack Clubs finances are made public at https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/ https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/
bos 10mo ago
Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.
- neural_thing 10mo ago
  "sustainable foundation" it's still one guy funding it, no? seems as sustainable as before
  - simonw 10mo ago
    33 additional people funding it as of this announcement: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions
  - mitchellh 10mo ago
    You can't build a house without the foundation (pun intended). I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is. All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't. I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
  - skywhopper 10mo ago
    How do you expect that to change? What is the next step in your mind? Maybe asking for donations? If only he would set up some way that the general public could contribute money to the project! That’d be the smart thing to do. Then he could write a blog post about it, and maybe someone would post a link to HN. That’d really be something.
  - fragmede 10mo ago
codeptualize 10mo ago
This seems really nice. Wasn't aware of hack club but that just looks like a wonderful construction and organization. In a world of VC backed open source projects with big profit motivations, it's refreshing to see things like this. Definitely going to give ghostty another try!
tcdent 10mo ago
I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.
- Arcuru 10mo ago
  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 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
  - mitchellh 10mo ago
    My intention is that the project isn't wholly dependent on me, so that I can move on (one day) and refocus my efforts elsewhere. I think no matter who the donor is, any charity dependent on the welfare of a single large whale is not a healthy organization. I intend to resolve this over time. That all being said, everyone should give where they want, and if you don't want to give to a terminal emulator non-profit project, then don't! Don't let anyone bully you (me, the person I'm responding to, or anyone else) into what you should and shouldn't charitably support. Enjoy. (Also, I don't want to repeat this everywhere but I paid taxes and I lost a comma, so no need to worry about that anymore! Everyone please pull out your most microscopic violins! )
    - komali2 10mo ago
      > 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?
nodesocket 10mo ago
I love Mitchell’s X post awhile back: “What the monetization strategy of Ghostty?” “My monetization strategy is that my bank account has 10 digits in it…” lol, epic.
- losvedir 10mo ago
  Ha. That counts the cents, though, I assume? I didn't think Hashicorp was that big, right?
  - nodesocket 10mo ago
    Shockingly I believe billionaire with a B. They timed the acquisition nearly perfect in terms of market conditions. Tres comma club!!!
    - bombcar 10mo ago
      Loving the idea that he got a bank transfer for $1b and it’s still just sitting there in his checking account.
      - nodesocket 10mo ago
        I would assume it's not sitting in his checking account. He hopefully has wealth advisors; earning interest, investments, tax strategies. Mitchell is super smart, so almost certainly not sitting in a checking account.
  - Romario77 10mo ago
    Hashicorp was sold for 6.5B to IBM. Another thing - when it went public it was valued at 13B and Hashimoto owned 8.5% of it according to the filing. So, depending on when he sold or converted his shares it is pretty plausible that he got a billion.
  - asadm 10mo ago
    was that big
- 10mo ago
LennyHenrysNuts 10mo ago
...and another $150k from my family... Wow.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- sethops1 10mo ago
  Not to dismiss the generosity, but he's a billionaire. A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.
alkh 10mo ago
The only thing I am missing now from Ghostty is being able to open it in any open Finder folder with a keyboard shortcut(like standard Ubuntu terminal). Ghostty already provides Finder-specific GUI shortcut but you need to use a mouse. Otherwise, stellar work(especially the ease of configuring it) and congrats to everyone involved!
- orbsa 10mo ago
  Can you not bind the command "open ." to a keybind through Ghostty?
  - tomjakubowski 10mo ago
    I think they are looking for the opposite: open a Ghostty window from Finder.
    - alkh 10mo ago
      Yeah, exactly, like Ctrl+Alt+T opening Xterm in Ubuntu. If I am not mistaken, if you have a file explorer open it will automatically open terminal in that specific folder(i.e. kind of like `cd`ing there first)
  - duskwuff 10mo ago
    Wrong direction. OP wants to open Ghostty from a Finder window, not vice versa.
- ubercow13 10mo ago
  You can set a keyboard shortcut for that GUI menu entry (and most others) in macOS system settings.
- presbyterian 10mo ago
  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)
- 10mo ago
srameshc 10mo ago
I never realize Ghostty is a project by Mitchell Hashimoto. I am very happy with tmux and never seriously looked at it , now I really curious what is it about and how it is different than say tmux ?
- ubercore 10mo ago
  It's a terminal, not a multiplexer. Different type of product.
- simonw 10mo ago
  It's not an alternative to tmux, it's an alternative to the macOS Terminal.app or iTerm2. You can run tmux inside Ghostty.
  - nurettin 10mo ago
    For those who will read this literally, it works fine on linux as well.
  - dmit 10mo ago
    To be fair, you can also run tmux inside tmux (inside Zellij, inside another tmux, inside screen, etc). :)
- alwillis 10mo ago
  tmux is another terminal layer inside of any terminal. Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.
dagi3d 10mo ago
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™
- trueno 10mo ago
  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 https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config to exist. neat
  - misiti3780 10mo ago
    i agree, you can search in the terminal like you can iterm2 either, which is super annoying.
    - jtbaker 10mo ago
      It’s merged to main but not in any district channels yet AFAIK
  - pprotas 10mo ago
    Regarding the SSH issue (if anyone else reading this had the same): Certain CLI tools complain about unknown $TERM env vars. For example, I could not open vim when SSHing into my Hetzner VPS in Ghostty. The fix is to set TERM to some well-known alternative before running your tool, like so: TERM=xterm vim
    - trueno 10mo ago
helterskelter 10mo ago
Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?
- commandersaki 10mo ago
  Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.
  - tristan957 10mo ago
    The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit as well.
- smw 10mo ago
  It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.
- sramsay 10mo ago
  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.
- mindcrash 10mo ago
  While foot focuses on minimalism, Ghostty brings along a shit ton of features like support for Kitty's (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) graphics protocol (in terminal images! - https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/), advanced window management (windows, tabs, splits) and OpenGL pixelshaders (https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html) Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
- loeg 10mo ago
  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.
VerifiedReports 10mo ago
Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer over the Mac's Terminal, for example?
- focom 10mo ago
  One personal gripe: Compared to the default terminal, ghostty, close the terminal on ctrl+d.
  - Xiol 10mo ago
    People use something other than CTRL-D to exit their terminal?
    - dbacar 10mo ago
      i type exit
      - VerifiedReports 10mo ago
        Same. I didn't know Ctrl-D did anything.
        quesera 10mo ago
        Ctrl+D is the ASCII End Of File (EOF) marker. Software that takes text input should interpret that as the end of the input. Shells decide that end of input means it's time to exit. Terminals usually decide that if the shell exits, there's nothing else to do and so close the window. macOS Terminal.app instead prints "Process exited", which I can't quite fathom the value of. I guess it's marginally less confusing than making the window disappear. :) (Note though -- I can't find it in Terminal.app settings right now, but there must be a way to change the behaviour to close the window instead. Mine is configured that way, but it's not the default)
        VerifiedReports 10mo ago
throwaway29827 10mo ago
So the same Hack Club from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 is now managing donations. Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna be donating to Ghostty any time soon. Just seems like a deeply unserious organization all around.
- patcon 10mo ago
  they are great, and I feel your concern is misplaced. when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced, famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship
  - debugnik 10mo ago
    "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.
    - patcon 10mo ago
      You're right that "beef" isn't the right term, and I apologise for the lazy take. But there was a values tension, and resulting values clash with someone who fell firmly on one side of the tension, seemingly a bit self-righteous in not feeling it to be a tension at all. I find the tension totally understandable and even healthy, and not something to "just fix" in a clear way, as the youth might have readers believe. My synopsis here got the +1 from a staff, so I'm assuming my experience in messy organizing gives me a decent read of the complexity of the situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917234
sfn42 10mo ago
[flagged]
purpleidea 10mo ago
This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free. Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
- simonw 10mo ago
  Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world. I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number of people.
  - miclill 10mo ago
    I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...
    - simonw 10mo ago
      I'd be really interested in hearing more about that argument. I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.
      - kragen 10mo ago
        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.
asim 10mo ago
Kudos to Mitchell for doing it. Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status, but knowing Mitchell, he's not about the money, power, status, etc so the project is in good hands and you can expect this to stay free.
- sevensor 10mo ago
  > A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think we’re ok.
  - geophph 10mo ago
    Terminals are the next bubble to burst
    - bombcar 10mo ago
      I’m pretty sure I had an xterm in the 90s that had a gl-accelerated burst for screen clear.
    - ykonstant 10mo ago
      The CLIpocalypse is coming!
- maccard 10mo ago
  > 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.
zwnow 10mo ago
[flagged]
wasmainiac 10mo ago
Your right! Strange. I thought I commented this to the Seattle thread… bug?
- aroman 10mo ago
  Did you post this comment on the wrong article? Nothing here has anything to do with AI whatsoever.
xrd 10mo ago
I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for these new CLIs. (UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
- TheRoque 10mo ago
  I'm curious as to why you are so excited ? What makes Ghostty so special ? (Especially compared to Kitty or Wezterm which I use)
  - alwillis 10mo ago
    WezTerm was my daily driver for a long time—it’s a great app. Ghostty is blazing fast and the attention to detail is fabulous. The theme picker is next level, for example; so are the typographical controls. It feels like an app made by a craftsman at the top of his game.
- PNewling 10mo ago
  Wow, I actually had no idea what he was a UW grad, let alone that I went there the same time he did... TIL
  - mitchellh 10mo ago
    I did a for-profit course registration tool called uwrobot too if you or any of your friends were customers of that...
simonw 10mo ago
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 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9798
arjie 10mo ago
Mitchell Hashimoto is a real programmer in the old vein. It's lovely to see him succeed. Ghostty is fantastic to use. There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that business you were just giving things away and never got to reap the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way. Love to see it.
- catlover76 10mo ago
  I always found the fact that he named a company after himself to be pretty off-putting, personally Also, didn't said company piss people off in some way that led to Open Tofu being created?
  - defen 10mo ago
    Dell, HP, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Ford...it's not exactly unheard of to name your company after yourself.
    - caseyohara 10mo ago
      Exactly. A huge number of household brands are named after people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_...
    - catlover76 10mo ago
      [dead]
  - cholantesh 10mo ago
    IIRC, he was on his way out by the time the BSL shenanigans were underway.
  - ceocoder 10mo ago
    Ferrari, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini, Tata, Honda, Toyota, Wal-Mart, Zuora (named after the two founders), Garmin (also named after the two founders).
tolerance 10mo ago
Is anyone opposed or at least of two minds concerning what could be described as the bureaucratization of FOSS? Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.
- skywhopper 10mo ago
  Ever heard of the Free Software Foundation? Apache Software Foundation? FreeBSD Foundation? Linux Foundation?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - akho 10mo ago
    xterm foundation, the urxvt conglomerate, foot collective farm, the ministry of alacritty, the 9term imperium st corporation when
- chrysoprace 10mo ago
  Non-profits allow projects to grow beyond hobbies. Covering costs (whether that's the expense of hosting / running the project or hiring talented people to work on it) is going to be a better incentive to keep the projects alive in the long term, meaning that people can rely on them instead of being wary that the project might become abandonware in a year.
xpe 10mo ago
> 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.
- skywhopper 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - xpe 10mo ago
    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.
Copenjin 10mo ago
> A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain. What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys
- dizhn 10mo ago
  No way! You need to incorporate a whole other company for that. By the way, it's a terminal emulator. I think we'll be fine if they pull the rug.
  - Copenjin 10mo ago
    Yeah, no doubt considering it's Hashimoto and considering the project, it was just a joke on what OpenAI did with their non-profit.
reducesuffering 10mo ago
"A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain. The structure legally binds Ghostty to the public-benefit purpose it was created to serve." I mean, after the OpenAI debacle, surely this type of assurance doesn't hold much weight anymore? (Though Ghostty is ofc very unlikely to pull shenanigans)
itarmonkey 10mo ago
we got hack club sponsorship in HS. Sanil chawla is a great guy
hsbauauvhabzb 10mo ago
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 :)
UPerfect 10mo ago
[flagged]
mmaunder 10mo ago
Thanks for doing this Mitchell, if you're on here, and for contributing to open source. Donated.
neural_thing 10mo ago
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-8f8b-be1e33945bab https://d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-...' from origin 'https://hcb.hackclub.com 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>
- garyhtou 10mo ago
  Hi there! Gary here from HCB (Hack Club's fiscal sponsorship program). Sorry about that! I've just pushed a fix for one of those errors. Although I wasn't able to reproduce this donation behavior on Chrome, I will continue investigating. I appreciate you reporting this!
vegabook 10mo ago
This is also good news for Zig.
- rogeliodh 10mo ago
  Is the Zig Software Foundation in good shape?
alphazard 10mo ago
I have yet to see a way that this software is better than leading terminal emulators like Alacritty and WezTerm. Alacritty is simple and blazing fast, WezTerm has a Lua API and is as complicated as you want it to be. All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig. Given that's the real reason everyone is talking about Ghostty (which I'm happy to be wrong about, let me know), It raises the question: Is crowding out other projects in a space, so that a billionaire can have a side project, really something we should be excited about? Unless the software is actually good, it seems like this is just an attention suck away from better software that could use it.
- maccard 10mo ago
  Alacritty is “barebones” and doesn’t have modern features like… tabs. Wezterm fits the vim/emacs bill of “make it whatever you want”. I want something in between - iTerm2 for 2025. Stuff like secure input on macOS is something that is just nice - it behaves like a real platform app and not jsut the lowest common denominator loosely ported. They say in the docs it’s not the best at anything, but it’s competitive in performance, features, and extensibility and that combo is a winner for me (personally)
  - dmytrokow 10mo ago
    > 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 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9756 That's why I'm staying on Alacritty on my company mac.
    - ubercow13 10mo ago
      Alacritty didn't even have scrollback for years. Alacritty's search is less useful than Ghostty's implementation as it you have to exit search mode to do anything else.
- skywhopper 10mo ago
caniszczyk 10mo ago
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 https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/hosting
bilekas 10mo ago
After hearing about Bun today, this is such a curveball. Ironic as it is in this 'get big enough to sell' ethos mentality that seems to be prevalent, this is what I would have expected from Bun. I like Ghostty, don't get a chance to use it enough but everyone I know loves it, this is so cool to hear. > Being non-profit clearly demonstrates our commitment to keeping Ghostty free and open source for everyone I do hope the creators and maintainers get something good though. Open source work seems majority ignored to me at least, and admittedly by me too most of the time.
- notpushkin 10mo ago
  > this is what I would have expected from Bun Alas, Bun is a VC-backed startup. Having $7m in funding is great, but it does come with some strings attached. But maybe now Bun founders can start a nonprofit project of their own!
throwaway1389z 10mo ago
It is amazing how Mitchell here talks about Rug-Pull after what his HashiCorp did with Terraform.
- notpushkin 10mo ago
  It was after the acquisition, no? I mean, yeah, you can argue that he knew it would happen, but this way: - he has $6B he can spend on other projects - we have OpenTofu under LF governance, backed by virtually everybody who was using Terraform before Win-win?
shevy-java 10mo ago
Can someone translate this for me? I understand he explained the rationale. I am not sure I understood it though. The biggest question I have right now is: why does it matter that a terminal is a non-profit? I think I am missing some pieces of the puzzle right now.
- AndyKelley 10mo ago
  Imagine you have a thriving, successful open source project with many users. Eventually, you want to move on to other things, but you don't want the project to die, or to be absorbed into AWS. Furthermore, you have a bunch of contributors who could really use financial support in order to sustain their efforts. What's your strategy?
  - akho 10mo ago
    I don't know. What are other terminal emulators doing?
RustSupremacist 10mo ago
This highlights the value of having non-profits as a 501(c)(3). The transparency about Hack Club is refreshing. The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
- jyunwai 10mo ago
  More context: 501(c)(3) orgs are non-profits that include charities, whereas 501(c)(6) orgs are non-profits with less strict requirements. Both are tax-exempt federally, but 501(c) orgs have higher financial transparency requirements and higher restrictions on political activity (which qualifies donations to 501(c)s as tax-deductible).
- yannoninator 10mo ago
  > 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 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).
  - aw1621107 10mo ago
    > To this day, individuals still CANNOT donate to the Rust Foundation which means it is not community led. The very same page you link contradicts this claim: > The Rust Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and non-member organizations alike! The difference is that the Rust Foundation accepts individual donations but does not (currently) accept individual memberships.
lillecarl 10mo ago
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/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/unscroll/ <- this for example makes such a difference when using multiple splits and some TUI style history search or whatever to unscroll.
thewtf 10mo ago
What exactly is the appeal of Ghostty? It doesn’t seem to offer anything new and it consumes more memory than other options.
jtokoph 10mo ago
Someone just made an anonymous $10,000 donation!
udev4096 10mo ago
Says the billionaire founder, cmon
danilafe 10mo ago
I keep seeing Ghostty in the news, and I've tried it, but it feels like just another terminal emulator to men. This coming from someone who spends 90% of the workday in the terminal. Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special about Ghostty compared to alternatives?
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  Here is the full about page it: https://ghostty.org/docs/about https://ghostty.org/docs/about Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
- jwr 10mo ago
  It's just better in every way than anything else I have ever tried (at least on a Mac). The author cares and it shows. BTW, I recently discovered shaders and cursor_blaze is absolutely awesome.
  - eviks 10mo ago
    It would be helpful if you actually listed the ways and the else
    - jwr 10mo ago
      Yes, it would.
    - agos 10mo ago
      For one, it’s way faster than both iTerm and terminal.app, the two most used terminal apps on MacOS
  - blazinglyfast 10mo ago
    Have you tried kitty?
- cess11 10mo ago
stephenr 10mo ago
Oh good. Thank fuck that one of the dozens if not hundreds of terminal emulators isn't going to be a "rug pull". It's a completely fucked situation when it happens to fairly unique/obscure software like say Terraform or Packer or Vagrant. But if it happened to some software that's so common it's literally competing against built in apps on every desktop OS, I just don't know what I'd ever do /s for anyone who needs it.
eviks 10mo ago
> but a non-profit structure allows others to contribute financially without fear of misappropriation or misuse of funds (as protected by legal requirements and oversight from the fiscal sponsor). None of the parenthesised provide any strong guarantees against these to alleviate such fears, are there not enough non-profits that misuse funds, say, on too high of an executive compensation instead of product development?
- lionkor 10mo ago
  The fiscal sponsor (Hack Club) is a sponsor to many projects, and they presumably do keep an eye on the finances.
  - eviks 10mo ago
    Why would you presume that? Especially given what it is: > We are teen hackers from around the world who code together (besides, "many projects" is more likely a downside here as it spreads the oversight resources)
    - lionkor 10mo ago
      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.
- sadeshmukh 10mo ago
  Transactions are public: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions HCB staff also do not take kindly to missing receipts or fraudulent behavior.
28304283409234 10mo ago
This is just a terminal emulator right?
- StrLght 10mo ago
  Yes, it is. It's so wild to see this. For years people didn't care that much about specific terminal emulators or opinionated dotfiles. Now projects like Ghostty and Omarchy get tons of attention. I get that it's probably not the projects themselves, but rather authors behind them. I'm also not saying that these projects are bad — they could be good. I don't use them, so I wouldn't know. It's just discouraging, seeing that other similar projects don't and probably won't get that traction.
lvl155 10mo ago
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.
- squirrellous 10mo ago
  > The guy is a coder through and through. I’d be proud if someone says that about me one day. Hope Mitchell will share the sentiment.
noisy_boy 10mo ago
I thought I'll give it a try - looks great but found it takes longer to start than konsole so back to the latter.
bmitc 10mo ago
Does anyone have a suggestion for a minimal but functional Ghostty configuration for tab completion? I'm using it on macOS, and I encounter a lot of issues with Ghostty with Oh My Zsh. It's often very slow, the shell crashes, and there's often a lot of display issues. I don't know if this is Ghostty or Oh My Zsh or what, so I'm just looking for a good setup that is as close to the stock Ghostty as possible.
155223 10mo ago
6003734342

1343 points by vrnvu 10mo ago

rvz 10mo ago

Smart decision and makes sense. Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned. Reminds me of Signal.

simonw 10mo ago

I wasn't aware of Hack Club before and wow, their fiscal sponsorship program is enormous: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/ 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/ 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-software-foundation/#acting-as-a-fiscal-sponsor https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...

conradev 10mo ago
Hack Club builds software, so the students naturally built a banking product to scale their fiscal sponsorship: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client (https://github.com/hackclub/burrow 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/ https://hackclub.com/slack/
- torben-friis 10mo ago
  This community sounds amazing, is there anything similar for adults rather than teens? The “understanding through building” mentality is something I never got to experience as a group, the obvious answer is open source and the like but I wonder if there’s something more learning oriented.
  - mellowyeller 10mo ago
    Seconding this. I pivoted to tech in my early 30s and feel I've missed out on a lot of community building opportunities.
    - leetrout 10mo ago
      Recurse Center might be a good option https://www.recurse.com https://www.recurse.com
      - conradev 10mo ago
        I would second Recurse Center. I've heard universally great things!
      - rrampage 10mo ago
        Recurse center is awesome! The community is curious, kind and supportive. I did 2 batches there and each one expanded my horizons as a programmer.
    - abnercoimbre 10mo ago
      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 https://handmadecities.com/meetups
      - MrChoke 10mo ago
        My city is on the list but when I submit I get a 404
        abnercoimbre 10mo ago
        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
- CactusBlue 10mo ago
  MMW: this will likely end up being the SVB for nonprofits
  - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    They're using Column (https://column.com/ https://column.com/) under the hood, so more like Stripe (payments + Atlas) for non profits I think? Still very powerful and material value of course on top of the banking partner primitive.
- sundarurfriend 10mo ago
  > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887)
  - deleted 10mo ago
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  - deleted 10mo ago
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  - conradev 10mo ago
    I do not speak for the 'club, but I believe it was resolved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292042
    - sundarurfriend 10mo ago
      Yes, as I mentioned, Slack made a U-turn after the thread got popular and became a PR disaster (after having ignored the issue again and again previously). That kind of behaviour indicates a service that shouldn't be relied on so much, at least not without low-friction alternates that you keep ready to jump onto, in case some exec there decides again that the Club is too tempting a prize to not attempt another squeeze.
- dannyobrien 10mo ago
  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-future https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-f...
garyhtou 10mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802), and we just launched a mobile app yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402
throwaway290 10mo ago
Hack Club was featured on front page not long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 It might have improved since then?
- dragonsenseiguy 10mo ago
  Yes, they have hired a lawyer. Also, as part of Hack Club it is an incredible place, meeting like minded people, participation in hackathons, member run programs like YSWS(You Ship We Ship) and much more!
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chrismorgan 10mo ago
> their fiscal sponsorship program is enormous: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/ 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.)
- Barbing 10mo ago
  Just let them know (admittedly not through a previously known reliable channel FYI, I’m a stranger)
- conradev 10mo ago
  and as with most things in Hack Club... it's open source :) https://github.com/hackclub/hcb/issues/12314 https://github.com/hackclub/hcb/issues/12314
dragonsenseiguy 10mo ago
It's incredible! HCB is a member run project where teens can also make their own non profits! Even Hack Clubs finances are made public at https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/ https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/

bos 10mo ago

Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.

neural_thing 10mo ago
"sustainable foundation" it's still one guy funding it, no? seems as sustainable as before
- simonw 10mo ago
  33 additional people funding it as of this announcement: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions
- mitchellh 10mo ago
  You can't build a house without the foundation (pun intended). I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is. All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't. I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
- skywhopper 10mo ago
  How do you expect that to change? What is the next step in your mind? Maybe asking for donations? If only he would set up some way that the general public could contribute money to the project! That’d be the smart thing to do. Then he could write a blog post about it, and maybe someone would post a link to HN. That’d really be something.
- fragmede 10mo ago

codeptualize 10mo ago

This seems really nice. Wasn't aware of hack club but that just looks like a wonderful construction and organization. In a world of VC backed open source projects with big profit motivations, it's refreshing to see things like this. Definitely going to give ghostty another try!

tcdent 10mo ago

I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.

Arcuru 10mo ago
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 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
- mitchellh 10mo ago
  My intention is that the project isn't wholly dependent on me, so that I can move on (one day) and refocus my efforts elsewhere. I think no matter who the donor is, any charity dependent on the welfare of a single large whale is not a healthy organization. I intend to resolve this over time. That all being said, everyone should give where they want, and if you don't want to give to a terminal emulator non-profit project, then don't! Don't let anyone bully you (me, the person I'm responding to, or anyone else) into what you should and shouldn't charitably support. Enjoy. (Also, I don't want to repeat this everywhere but I paid taxes and I lost a comma, so no need to worry about that anymore! Everyone please pull out your most microscopic violins! )
  - komali2 10mo ago
    > 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?

nodesocket 10mo ago

I love Mitchell’s X post awhile back: “What the monetization strategy of Ghostty?” “My monetization strategy is that my bank account has 10 digits in it…” lol, epic.

losvedir 10mo ago
Ha. That counts the cents, though, I assume? I didn't think Hashicorp was that big, right?
- nodesocket 10mo ago
  Shockingly I believe billionaire with a B. They timed the acquisition nearly perfect in terms of market conditions. Tres comma club!!!
  - bombcar 10mo ago
    Loving the idea that he got a bank transfer for $1b and it’s still just sitting there in his checking account.
    - nodesocket 10mo ago
      I would assume it's not sitting in his checking account. He hopefully has wealth advisors; earning interest, investments, tax strategies. Mitchell is super smart, so almost certainly not sitting in a checking account.
- Romario77 10mo ago
  Hashicorp was sold for 6.5B to IBM. Another thing - when it went public it was valued at 13B and Hashimoto owned 8.5% of it according to the filing. So, depending on when he sold or converted his shares it is pretty plausible that he got a billion.
- asadm 10mo ago
  was that big
10mo ago

LennyHenrysNuts 10mo ago

...and another $150k from my family... Wow.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
sethops1 10mo ago
Not to dismiss the generosity, but he's a billionaire. A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.

alkh 10mo ago

The only thing I am missing now from Ghostty is being able to open it in any open Finder folder with a keyboard shortcut(like standard Ubuntu terminal). Ghostty already provides Finder-specific GUI shortcut but you need to use a mouse. Otherwise, stellar work(especially the ease of configuring it) and congrats to everyone involved!

orbsa 10mo ago
Can you not bind the command "open ." to a keybind through Ghostty?
- tomjakubowski 10mo ago
  I think they are looking for the opposite: open a Ghostty window from Finder.
  - alkh 10mo ago
    Yeah, exactly, like Ctrl+Alt+T opening Xterm in Ubuntu. If I am not mistaken, if you have a file explorer open it will automatically open terminal in that specific folder(i.e. kind of like `cd`ing there first)
- duskwuff 10mo ago
  Wrong direction. OP wants to open Ghostty from a Finder window, not vice versa.
ubercow13 10mo ago
You can set a keyboard shortcut for that GUI menu entry (and most others) in macOS system settings.
presbyterian 10mo ago
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)
10mo ago

srameshc 10mo ago

I never realize Ghostty is a project by Mitchell Hashimoto. I am very happy with tmux and never seriously looked at it , now I really curious what is it about and how it is different than say tmux ?

ubercore 10mo ago
It's a terminal, not a multiplexer. Different type of product.
simonw 10mo ago
It's not an alternative to tmux, it's an alternative to the macOS Terminal.app or iTerm2. You can run tmux inside Ghostty.
- nurettin 10mo ago
  For those who will read this literally, it works fine on linux as well.
- dmit 10mo ago
  To be fair, you can also run tmux inside tmux (inside Zellij, inside another tmux, inside screen, etc). :)
alwillis 10mo ago
tmux is another terminal layer inside of any terminal. Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.

dagi3d 10mo ago

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™

trueno 10mo ago
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 https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config to exist. neat
- misiti3780 10mo ago
  i agree, you can search in the terminal like you can iterm2 either, which is super annoying.
  - jtbaker 10mo ago
    It’s merged to main but not in any district channels yet AFAIK
- pprotas 10mo ago
  Regarding the SSH issue (if anyone else reading this had the same): Certain CLI tools complain about unknown $TERM env vars. For example, I could not open vim when SSHing into my Hetzner VPS in Ghostty. The fix is to set TERM to some well-known alternative before running your tool, like so: TERM=xterm vim
  - trueno 10mo ago

helterskelter 10mo ago

Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?

commandersaki 10mo ago
Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.
- tristan957 10mo ago
  The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit as well.
smw 10mo ago
It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.
sramsay 10mo ago
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.
mindcrash 10mo ago
While foot focuses on minimalism, Ghostty brings along a shit ton of features like support for Kitty's (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) graphics protocol (in terminal images! - https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/), advanced window management (windows, tabs, splits) and OpenGL pixelshaders (https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html) Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
loeg 10mo ago
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.

VerifiedReports 10mo ago

Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer over the Mac's Terminal, for example?

focom 10mo ago
One personal gripe: Compared to the default terminal, ghostty, close the terminal on ctrl+d.
- Xiol 10mo ago
  People use something other than CTRL-D to exit their terminal?
  - dbacar 10mo ago
    i type exit
    - VerifiedReports 10mo ago
      Same. I didn't know Ctrl-D did anything.
      - quesera 10mo ago
        Ctrl+D is the ASCII End Of File (EOF) marker. Software that takes text input should interpret that as the end of the input. Shells decide that end of input means it's time to exit. Terminals usually decide that if the shell exits, there's nothing else to do and so close the window. macOS Terminal.app instead prints "Process exited", which I can't quite fathom the value of. I guess it's marginally less confusing than making the window disappear. :) (Note though -- I can't find it in Terminal.app settings right now, but there must be a way to change the behaviour to close the window instead. Mine is configured that way, but it's not the default)
        VerifiedReports 10mo ago

throwaway29827 10mo ago

So the same Hack Club from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913663 is now managing donations. Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna be donating to Ghostty any time soon. Just seems like a deeply unserious organization all around.

patcon 10mo ago
they are great, and I feel your concern is misplaced. when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced, famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship
- debugnik 10mo ago
  "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.
  - patcon 10mo ago
    You're right that "beef" isn't the right term, and I apologise for the lazy take. But there was a values tension, and resulting values clash with someone who fell firmly on one side of the tension, seemingly a bit self-righteous in not feeling it to be a tension at all. I find the tension totally understandable and even healthy, and not something to "just fix" in a clear way, as the youth might have readers believe. My synopsis here got the +1 from a staff, so I'm assuming my experience in messy organizing gives me a decent read of the complexity of the situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45917234

sfn42 10mo ago

[flagged]

purpleidea 10mo ago

This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free. Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.

simonw 10mo ago
Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world. I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number of people.
- miclill 10mo ago
  I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...
  - simonw 10mo ago
    I'd be really interested in hearing more about that argument. I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.
    - kragen 10mo ago
      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.

asim 10mo ago

Kudos to Mitchell for doing it. Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status, but knowing Mitchell, he's not about the money, power, status, etc so the project is in good hands and you can expect this to stay free.

sevensor 10mo ago
> A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think we’re ok.
- geophph 10mo ago
  Terminals are the next bubble to burst
  - bombcar 10mo ago
    I’m pretty sure I had an xterm in the 90s that had a gl-accelerated burst for screen clear.
  - ykonstant 10mo ago
    The CLIpocalypse is coming!
maccard 10mo ago
> 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.

zwnow 10mo ago

[flagged]

wasmainiac 10mo ago

Your right! Strange. I thought I commented this to the Seattle thread… bug?

aroman 10mo ago
Did you post this comment on the wrong article? Nothing here has anything to do with AI whatsoever.

xrd 10mo ago

I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for these new CLIs. (UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)

TheRoque 10mo ago
I'm curious as to why you are so excited ? What makes Ghostty so special ? (Especially compared to Kitty or Wezterm which I use)
- alwillis 10mo ago
  WezTerm was my daily driver for a long time—it’s a great app. Ghostty is blazing fast and the attention to detail is fabulous. The theme picker is next level, for example; so are the typographical controls. It feels like an app made by a craftsman at the top of his game.
PNewling 10mo ago
Wow, I actually had no idea what he was a UW grad, let alone that I went there the same time he did... TIL
- mitchellh 10mo ago
  I did a for-profit course registration tool called uwrobot too if you or any of your friends were customers of that...

simonw 10mo ago

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 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9798

arjie 10mo ago

Mitchell Hashimoto is a real programmer in the old vein. It's lovely to see him succeed. Ghostty is fantastic to use. There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that business you were just giving things away and never got to reap the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way. Love to see it.

catlover76 10mo ago
I always found the fact that he named a company after himself to be pretty off-putting, personally Also, didn't said company piss people off in some way that led to Open Tofu being created?
- defen 10mo ago
  Dell, HP, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, Ford...it's not exactly unheard of to name your company after yourself.
  - caseyohara 10mo ago
    Exactly. A huge number of household brands are named after people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_named_after_...
  - catlover76 10mo ago
    [dead]
- cholantesh 10mo ago
  IIRC, he was on his way out by the time the BSL shenanigans were underway.
- ceocoder 10mo ago
  Ferrari, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini, Tata, Honda, Toyota, Wal-Mart, Zuora (named after the two founders), Garmin (also named after the two founders).

tolerance 10mo ago

Is anyone opposed or at least of two minds concerning what could be described as the bureaucratization of FOSS? Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.

skywhopper 10mo ago
Ever heard of the Free Software Foundation? Apache Software Foundation? FreeBSD Foundation? Linux Foundation?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- akho 10mo ago
  xterm foundation, the urxvt conglomerate, foot collective farm, the ministry of alacritty, the 9term imperium st corporation when
chrysoprace 10mo ago
Non-profits allow projects to grow beyond hobbies. Covering costs (whether that's the expense of hosting / running the project or hiring talented people to work on it) is going to be a better incentive to keep the projects alive in the long term, meaning that people can rely on them instead of being wary that the project might become abandonware in a year.

xpe 10mo ago

> 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.

skywhopper 10mo ago
[flagged]
- xpe 10mo ago
  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.

Copenjin 10mo ago

> A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain. What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys

dizhn 10mo ago
No way! You need to incorporate a whole other company for that. By the way, it's a terminal emulator. I think we'll be fine if they pull the rug.
- Copenjin 10mo ago
  Yeah, no doubt considering it's Hashimoto and considering the project, it was just a joke on what OpenAI did with their non-profit.

reducesuffering 10mo ago

"A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain. The structure legally binds Ghostty to the public-benefit purpose it was created to serve." I mean, after the OpenAI debacle, surely this type of assurance doesn't hold much weight anymore? (Though Ghostty is ofc very unlikely to pull shenanigans)

itarmonkey 10mo ago

we got hack club sponsorship in HS. Sanil chawla is a great guy

hsbauauvhabzb 10mo ago

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 :)

UPerfect 10mo ago

[flagged]

mmaunder 10mo ago

Thanks for doing this Mitchell, if you're on here, and for contributing to open source. Donated.

neural_thing 10mo ago

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-8f8b-be1e33945bab https://d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-...' from origin 'https://hcb.hackclub.com 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>

garyhtou 10mo ago
Hi there! Gary here from HCB (Hack Club's fiscal sponsorship program). Sorry about that! I've just pushed a fix for one of those errors. Although I wasn't able to reproduce this donation behavior on Chrome, I will continue investigating. I appreciate you reporting this!

vegabook 10mo ago

This is also good news for Zig.

rogeliodh 10mo ago
Is the Zig Software Foundation in good shape?

alphazard 10mo ago

I have yet to see a way that this software is better than leading terminal emulators like Alacritty and WezTerm. Alacritty is simple and blazing fast, WezTerm has a Lua API and is as complicated as you want it to be. All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig. Given that's the real reason everyone is talking about Ghostty (which I'm happy to be wrong about, let me know), It raises the question: Is crowding out other projects in a space, so that a billionaire can have a side project, really something we should be excited about? Unless the software is actually good, it seems like this is just an attention suck away from better software that could use it.

maccard 10mo ago
Alacritty is “barebones” and doesn’t have modern features like… tabs. Wezterm fits the vim/emacs bill of “make it whatever you want”. I want something in between - iTerm2 for 2025. Stuff like secure input on macOS is something that is just nice - it behaves like a real platform app and not jsut the lowest common denominator loosely ported. They say in the docs it’s not the best at anything, but it’s competitive in performance, features, and extensibility and that combo is a winner for me (personally)
- dmytrokow 10mo ago
  > 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 https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9756 That's why I'm staying on Alacritty on my company mac.
  - ubercow13 10mo ago
    Alacritty didn't even have scrollback for years. Alacritty's search is less useful than Ghostty's implementation as it you have to exit search mode to do anything else.
skywhopper 10mo ago

caniszczyk 10mo ago

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 https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/hosting

bilekas 10mo ago

After hearing about Bun today, this is such a curveball. Ironic as it is in this 'get big enough to sell' ethos mentality that seems to be prevalent, this is what I would have expected from Bun. I like Ghostty, don't get a chance to use it enough but everyone I know loves it, this is so cool to hear. > Being non-profit clearly demonstrates our commitment to keeping Ghostty free and open source for everyone I do hope the creators and maintainers get something good though. Open source work seems majority ignored to me at least, and admittedly by me too most of the time.

notpushkin 10mo ago
> this is what I would have expected from Bun Alas, Bun is a VC-backed startup. Having $7m in funding is great, but it does come with some strings attached. But maybe now Bun founders can start a nonprofit project of their own!

throwaway1389z 10mo ago

It is amazing how Mitchell here talks about Rug-Pull after what his HashiCorp did with Terraform.

notpushkin 10mo ago
It was after the acquisition, no? I mean, yeah, you can argue that he knew it would happen, but this way: - he has $6B he can spend on other projects - we have OpenTofu under LF governance, backed by virtually everybody who was using Terraform before Win-win?

shevy-java 10mo ago

Can someone translate this for me? I understand he explained the rationale. I am not sure I understood it though. The biggest question I have right now is: why does it matter that a terminal is a non-profit? I think I am missing some pieces of the puzzle right now.

AndyKelley 10mo ago
Imagine you have a thriving, successful open source project with many users. Eventually, you want to move on to other things, but you don't want the project to die, or to be absorbed into AWS. Furthermore, you have a bunch of contributors who could really use financial support in order to sustain their efforts. What's your strategy?
- akho 10mo ago
  I don't know. What are other terminal emulators doing?

RustSupremacist 10mo ago

This highlights the value of having non-profits as a 501(c)(3). The transparency about Hack Club is refreshing. The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.

jyunwai 10mo ago
More context: 501(c)(3) orgs are non-profits that include charities, whereas 501(c)(6) orgs are non-profits with less strict requirements. Both are tax-exempt federally, but 501(c) orgs have higher financial transparency requirements and higher restrictions on political activity (which qualifies donations to 501(c)s as tax-deductible).
yannoninator 10mo ago
> 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 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).
- aw1621107 10mo ago
  > To this day, individuals still CANNOT donate to the Rust Foundation which means it is not community led. The very same page you link contradicts this claim: > The Rust Foundation gratefully accepts donations from individuals and non-member organizations alike! The difference is that the Rust Foundation accepts individual donations but does not (currently) accept individual memberships.

lillecarl 10mo ago

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/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/unscroll/ <- this for example makes such a difference when using multiple splits and some TUI style history search or whatever to unscroll.

thewtf 10mo ago

What exactly is the appeal of Ghostty? It doesn’t seem to offer anything new and it consumes more memory than other options.

jtokoph 10mo ago

Someone just made an anonymous $10,000 donation!

udev4096 10mo ago

Says the billionaire founder, cmon

danilafe 10mo ago

I keep seeing Ghostty in the news, and I've tried it, but it feels like just another terminal emulator to men. This coming from someone who spends 90% of the workday in the terminal. Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special about Ghostty compared to alternatives?

throwaway2037 10mo ago
Here is the full about page it: https://ghostty.org/docs/about https://ghostty.org/docs/about Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
jwr 10mo ago
It's just better in every way than anything else I have ever tried (at least on a Mac). The author cares and it shows. BTW, I recently discovered shaders and cursor_blaze is absolutely awesome.
- eviks 10mo ago
  It would be helpful if you actually listed the ways and the else
  - jwr 10mo ago
    Yes, it would.
  - agos 10mo ago
    For one, it’s way faster than both iTerm and terminal.app, the two most used terminal apps on MacOS
- blazinglyfast 10mo ago
  Have you tried kitty?
cess11 10mo ago

stephenr 10mo ago

Oh good. Thank fuck that one of the dozens if not hundreds of terminal emulators isn't going to be a "rug pull". It's a completely fucked situation when it happens to fairly unique/obscure software like say Terraform or Packer or Vagrant. But if it happened to some software that's so common it's literally competing against built in apps on every desktop OS, I just don't know what I'd ever do /s for anyone who needs it.

eviks 10mo ago

> but a non-profit structure allows others to contribute financially without fear of misappropriation or misuse of funds (as protected by legal requirements and oversight from the fiscal sponsor). None of the parenthesised provide any strong guarantees against these to alleviate such fears, are there not enough non-profits that misuse funds, say, on too high of an executive compensation instead of product development?

lionkor 10mo ago
The fiscal sponsor (Hack Club) is a sponsor to many projects, and they presumably do keep an eye on the finances.
- eviks 10mo ago
  Why would you presume that? Especially given what it is: > We are teen hackers from around the world who code together (besides, "many projects" is more likely a downside here as it spreads the oversight resources)
  - lionkor 10mo ago
    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.
sadeshmukh 10mo ago
Transactions are public: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions HCB staff also do not take kindly to missing receipts or fraudulent behavior.

28304283409234 10mo ago

This is just a terminal emulator right?

StrLght 10mo ago
Yes, it is. It's so wild to see this. For years people didn't care that much about specific terminal emulators or opinionated dotfiles. Now projects like Ghostty and Omarchy get tons of attention. I get that it's probably not the projects themselves, but rather authors behind them. I'm also not saying that these projects are bad — they could be good. I don't use them, so I wouldn't know. It's just discouraging, seeing that other similar projects don't and probably won't get that traction.

lvl155 10mo ago

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.

squirrellous 10mo ago
> The guy is a coder through and through. I’d be proud if someone says that about me one day. Hope Mitchell will share the sentiment.

noisy_boy 10mo ago

I thought I'll give it a try - looks great but found it takes longer to start than konsole so back to the latter.

bmitc 10mo ago

Does anyone have a suggestion for a minimal but functional Ghostty configuration for tab completion? I'm using it on macOS, and I encounter a lot of issues with Ghostty with Oh My Zsh. It's often very slow, the shell crashes, and there's often a lot of display issues. I don't know if this is Ghostty or Oh My Zsh or what, so I'm just looking for a good setup that is as close to the stock Ghostty as possible.

155223 10mo ago

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