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Ghostty is now non-profit

mitchellh.com

121–130 of 304 posts

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#121
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.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#122
post #54

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

> A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think we’re ok.

Terminals are the next bubble to burst

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#123

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…

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)

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#124
post #69

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.

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?

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#125
post #7
post #2

I wasn't aware of Hack Club before and wow, their fiscal sponsorship program is enormous: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/ - looks like they cover more than 2,500 organizations! The Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/ ) and it keeps our accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack…

Hack Club builds software, so the students naturally built a banking product to scale their fiscal sponsorship: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client ( https://github.com/hackclub/burrow ) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization. The students have one big global Slack instance.…

> 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)

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#126

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…

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 pe…

> Alacritty is “barebones” and doesn’t have modern features like... tabs.

It does. And the barebones complaint is literally funny (I'm mentally giggling) because Ghostty didn't have modern features like... search, literally 4 days ago https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9756

That's why I'm staying on Alacritty on my company mac.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#127
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hack Club builds software, so the students naturally built a banking product to scale their fiscal sponsorship: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/ I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client ( https://github.com/hackclub/burrow ) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization. The students have one big global Slack instance.…

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.

I know I'm jaded but anytime I see a business situation and they specifically say you must be a MINOR to work with them... I get kinda suspicious.

>Yes, I'm a teenager ,18 and under

So not actually a teenager but a minor is what they mean and use what I would call deceptive language around it. But why?....

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#128

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

gnome-terminal is GTK 3 last I checked, and foot uses Wayland primitives. If you want a native terminal feel, Ghostty would be a great terminal. On Linux, my backup terminal is Ptyxis, authored by Christian Hergert. I recommend Ptyxis over gnome-terminal or gnome-console.

Ghostty feels a lot less native than foot on Wayland. Example: it doesn't respect Fontconfig preferences, so it doesn't use your configured monospace font. In general, Ghostty feels quite alien for me.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#130

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

Original post: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940 > I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.

tres commas and doors that go like this

chad

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