8 ms·
I'm the original creator of Ghostty. It's been a few years now! I don't know why this is on the front page of HN again but let me give some meaningful updates a
by mitchellh 7mo ago
I'm the original creator of Ghostty. It's been a few years now! I don't know why this is on the front page of HN again but let me give some meaningful updates across the board.
First, libghostty is _way more exciting_ nowadays. It is already backing more than a dozen terminal projects that are free and commercial: https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty https://github.com/Uzaaft/awesome-libghostty I think this is the real future of Ghostty and I've said this since my first public talk on Ghostty in 2023: the real goal is a diverse ecosystem of terminal emulators that aim to solve specific terminal usage but all based on a shared, stable, feature-rich, high performant core. It's happening! More details what libghostty is here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming https://mitchellh.com/writing/libghostty-is-coming
I suspect by the middle of 2027, the number of people using Ghostty via libghostty will dwarf the number of users that actually use the Ghostty GUI. This is a win on all sides, because more libghostty usage leads to more stable Ghostty GUI too (since Ghostty itself is... of course... a libghostty consumer). We've already had many bugs fixed sourced by libghostty embedders.
On the GUI front Ghostty the apps are still getting lots of new features and are highly used. Ghostty the macOS app gets around one million downloads per week (I have no data on Linux because I don't produce builds). I'm sure a lot of that is automated but it's still a big number. I have no telemetry in Ghostty to give more detailed notes. I have some data from big 3rd party TUI apps with telemetry that show Ghostty as their biggest user base but that is skewed towards people consuming newer TUIs tend to use newer terminals. The point is: lots of people use it, its proven in the real world, and we're continuing to improve it big time.
Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more. In addition to GUI features it ships some big improvements to VT functionality, as always.
Organizationally, Ghostty is now backed by a non-profit organization: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-non-profit And just this past week we signed our first 4 contributor contracts to pay contributors real money! Our finances are all completely public and transparent online. This is to show the commitment I have to making Ghostty non-commercial and non-reliant on me (the second part over time).
That's a 10,000 foot overview of what's going on. Exciting times in Ghostty land. :) Happy to answer any big questions.
- tinodb 7mo agoThanks for creating Ghostty! Is there a chance to have shorter release cycles? I switched to nightly because of the mem bug and search, but ideally would like to be on a more stable channel.
- firemelt 7mo agobro please update ur support for not gtk DE please
- nvme0n1p1 7mo agoNow that Ghostty is part of a real org, is there any way people can sponsor specific features/bugfixes? I've been waiting for drag/drop to be working on KDE before I make the switch, and I'd be happy to pay for a fix.
- aayushdutt 7mo ago[flagged]
- eelke 7mo agoFYI: It is working in nightly!
- sethammons 7mo agowhile I agree, the comment you just replied to says: > Ghostty 1.3 is around the corner, literally a week or two away, and will bring some critically important features like search (cmd+f), scrollbars, and dozens more
- jen20 7mo agoIt works well enough that I didn't realize I've been on the nightly channel since it appeared, too!
- oDot 7mo agoI'm the author of Trolley[0] (Electron for TUIs). It was so easy to get the terminal functionality going with `libghostty`. Most time was spent building the functionality around it. Thanks for making it. [0]: https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley https://github.com/weedonandscott/trolley