Ghostty is now non-profit • Hacker News Board

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#241

Post by novella_rel » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 10:41 AM UTC

danilafe wrote: post #198

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

To me it has a couple advantages over the other options on the market.

1. Feels 'native' and is built for each platform. This means I can use for example familiar right click context menu's and tabs that I find on every other app. I have the option to use the mouse as well as the keyboard which I appreciate.

2. It has sensible defaults with a "Zero Configuration Philosophy" meaning that many of the things I would usually need to fiddle with are already set.

3. It performs comparably to advanced terminal emulators such as kitty.

The combination of all three (and especially the first) is why I use it.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#242

Post by eviks » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 10:55 AM UTC

Xiol wrote: post #49

focom wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One personal gripe: Compared to the default terminal, ghostty, close the terminal on ctrl+d.

People use something other than CTRL-D to exit their terminal?

Yes, of course, many people use the same shortcut for the same action in all the apps

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#243

Post by kombine » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 10:55 AM UTC

danilafe wrote: post #198

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?

I've been using Kitty terminal and they are absolutely comparable in the feature set: GPU-based rendering, speed, customisation. OS-native controls in Ghostty are not very important to me, I like terminal being a terminal, not a GUI.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#244

Post by austhrow743 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 11:18 AM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #201

cholantesh wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think it was possible for anyone to express this thought more obnoxiously than DHH but here we are.

Is DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) worth 100M USD? Google results say he is worth about 50M USD... so "only" two commas.

Three comma club is for billionaires.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#245

Post by ilvez » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 11:21 AM UTC

cpach wrote: post #82

anorwell wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But only in the the tip (nightly) build. I'm somewhat tempted to switch to them for this.

A while ago I compiled Ghostty from HEAD, because it had a bug fix I cared for. It was a very stable and pleasant experience. No hassle whatsoever.

If you need to do that again note that there is asdf plugin as well ;-)

For Linux compiling is actually the only way to get tip.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#246

Post by mstade » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 11:30 AM UTC

catlover76 wrote: post #124

arjie wrote: 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?

I don't know the specifics of naming that particular company, but being the majority stakeholder of two companies myself I can tell you that naming companies is just as hard as naming things in programming. Both of my companies are named after myself, one directly so and the other being a portmanteau of my business partner's and my names.

It had very little to do with self aggrandizing and more to do with the tax authorities need a name and time was limited. The names were used mostly as placeholders and then stuck. Branding is hard.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#247

Post by debugnik » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 11:46 AM UTC

patcon wrote: post #160

throwaway29827 wrote: post #34

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

they are great, and I feel your concern is misplaced. when you support literally thousands of teenagers over the internet (the delightfully overconfident, inexperienced, famous-for-trolling humans that they are) and literally only a handful have beef with you, you are running a really solid ship

"Beef" is a strange way to denote reacting to adults relying on unsupervised teenagers to manage PII and then hiding and denying their mistakes. The beef here seems to be from one whose complaints about it were dismissed, instead of taken seriously.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#248

Post by akho » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 11:51 AM UTC

sdqali wrote: post #140

helterskelter wrote: post #29

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

- It looks good. Or more correctly, it is easy to make it look good. If one spends a lot of time in the Terminal emulator, it looking good has some positives. - It uses plain text configuration that is easy to modify and version control. Edit: - At least on Linux, foot's support for windows and tabs is limited to starting an entirely new process.

the edit is not true. footclient is, like, right there.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#249

Post by akho » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 11:54 AM UTC

alwillis wrote: post #156

neop1x wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or WezTerm which is much more usable and polished than this. I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media hype.

> I don't think there are any. It is likely just a social media hype. It's not hype. Here's a comprehensive review of a lot of terminals and Ghostty did very well--"State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions" [1] [1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...

Have you read the post you linked, and do you understand what it is about?

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#250

Post by maccard » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 12:00 PM UTC

asim wrote: 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.

> 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.