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Ghostty is now non-profit

mitchellh.com

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Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#161

Post by komali2 »

mitchellh wrote: post #101
Arcuru wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strate…

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 proj…

> 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?

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#162

Post by alwillis »

alphazard wrote: post #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…

> All of the fuss seems to be entirely driven by Mitchell's clout, and maybe some interest in Zig.

Nope, that's not it.

It's mostly because he noticed the majority of terminal applications were okay but not great. So he decides to address this by creating a cross-platform terminal app that's faster and more compatible than pretty much every existing terminal app. And has a native macOS UI written in Swift without compromising its cross-platform features.

Kind of out of nowhere, Ghostty is in the conversation of being the best terminal app available. "Best" doesn't mean the most features; but it nails speed and compatibility. (I’d love to see iTerm switch to using libghostty in the near future. That would be a killer combination!)

From "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions": [1]

Before presenting the latest results, Ghostty warrants particular attention, not only because it scored the highest among all terminals tested, but that it was publicly released only this year by Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a significant advancement. Developed from scratch in Zig, the Unicode support implementation is thoroughly correct

In 2023, Mitchell published Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators, demonstrating a commitment to understanding and implementing the fundamentals. His recent announcement of libghostty provides a welcome alternative to libvte, potentially enabling a new generation of terminals on a foundation of strong Unicode support.

[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#164

Post by GCUMstlyHarmls »

alphazard wrote: post #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…

For me, Alacritty and Foot do not support ligatures, Kitty does now but I personally find the maintainers behaviour a bit abrasive. Wezterm is great but I found it noticeably slow in some (dumb) instances -- eg 144fps rendering of games, input latency and had issues on wayland at some point.

Dunno if that makes Ghostty "better" than other terminals, probably not. It just ticks the boxes of ligatures, fast, integration with wayland, simple amount of configuration to work how I want. It also seemed to have a focus on "correctness" which I appreciate. I don't use any of the tab/ssh/whatever features. I know ligatures are the new vi-vs-emacs religious war. Without that single feature-request, I'd probably just use foot. Swapping terminal also isn't that hard, it'd easily swap to something else if it gave me a reason.

I do think its reasonable to question focus on a millionaires toy with a large social presence vs other projects, helped by the somewhat --if not intentional, at least side-effecting -- hype-focused release style of Ghostty. Would it be nearly as successful if it were released anonymously at a 1.0? Probably not? Maybe? It does score highly in sort of arbitrary feature & performance benchmarks so it would probably still have a number of users without the name attached.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#165

Post by jarjoura »

yalok wrote: post #143
jarjoura wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are hundreds of thousands of software engineers who, given FU amounts of money, would absolutely keep writing software and do it only for the love of it. The companies that hire us usually make us sign promises that we won't work on side projects. Even if there are legal workarounds to that, it's not quite so simple. Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods…

moonlighting is permitted by law in California (companies legally can't prevent you from doing it, iiuc), as long as there's no conflict of interest with your main job...

"no conflict of interest" is basically meaningless if your day job is writing software. These clauses you sign are quite broad in what that scope of conflict could be.

Every company I've worked for has had very explicit rules that say, you must get written permission from someone at some director or VP level sign off on your "side project," open source or not.

You might want to check your company guidelines around this just to make sure you're safe.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#166

Post by jarjoura »

fragmede wrote: post #146
yalok wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

moonlighting is permitted by law in California (companies legally can't prevent you from doing it, iiuc), as long as there's no conflict of interest with your main job...

As long as you don't use their hardware to do it.

that goes without saying, but it's still not free permission when you use your own stuff.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#167

Post by lillecarl »

charcircuit wrote: post #155
mindcrash wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little tongue-in-cheek, but as you can see elsewhere in this discussion thread he mentions this himself on his own X account: "get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate." https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940 Take a good guess where the three commas…

>The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate." Having money doesn't mean that you'll have the motivation to continue working on something for free forever.

Free work is the most rewarding work on every metric but monetization in my experience, and when you hit road bumps you can pay your way out of it to keep going. Sounds like the literal dream

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#168

Post by bombcar »

geophph wrote: post #122
sevensor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Terminals are the next bubble to burst

I’m pretty sure I had an xterm in the 90s that had a gl-accelerated burst for screen clear.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#169

Post by bombcar »

quesera wrote: post #88
VerifiedReports wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I didn't know Ctrl-D did anything.

Ctrl+D is the ASCII End Of File (EOF) marker. Software that takes text input should interpret that as the end of the input. Shells decide that end of input means it's time to exit. Terminals usually decide that if the shell exits, there's nothing else to do and so close the window. macOS Terminal.app instead prints "Process exited", which I can't quite fathom the value of. I guess it's marginally less confusing than…

Process exited is somewhat useful if you want to look at the results-but even then I think it exits automatically if you opened it by double clicking a script.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#170

Post by bombcar »

nodesocket wrote: post #27
losvedir wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. That counts the cents, though, I assume? I didn't think Hashicorp was that big, right?

Shockingly I believe billionaire with a B. They timed the acquisition nearly perfect in terms of market conditions. Tres comma club!!!

Loving the idea that he got a bank transfer for $1b and it’s still just sitting there in his checking account.
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