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Ghostty is now non-profit

mitchellh.com

281–290 of 304 posts

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#281

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 usu…

I tried it a few months ago, and didn't perceive any of those items as particular benefits.

1. Terminal emulators that feel 'native' are ubiquitous. Sure, there are also a lot that have idiosyncratic UIs, but I'm not generally using those -- my go-to when working within a GUI environment is xfce4-terminal, which is about as native as I can imagine, given that I'm using XFCE as my primary desktop environment.

2. Sensible defaults may be good for new users, but I already have my terminal emulators configured exactly as I like them, and my benchmark for switching from one tool to another within the same category isn't how welcoming it is to novice users out of the box, it's how easily I can adjust its configuration to match my long-established preferences. The "zero configuration" philosophy is actually a detriment here, as it leads to configurability being obscured to some extent.

3. When I tested it, its performance was worse than xfce4-terminal, both objectively and subjectively. Its memory consumption was higher and it felt laggier in responding to input.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#282
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i type exit

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

In fact I know the ctrl-d stuff, yet it is too much strain on your wrist if you use a finger to press the CTRL. Takes longer but typing exit is way easier.

Alternatively I use the intersection of my palm and left pinky to press CTRL.

:)

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#283
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In fact I know the ctrl-d stuff, yet it is too much strain on your wrist if you use a finger to press the CTRL. Takes longer but typing exit is way easier. Alternatively I use the intersection of my palm and left pinky to press CTRL. :)

Remap caps-lock to be ctrl to save yourself from RSI.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#284
post #248
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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.

I had never tried footclient. Thank you for the correction.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#285
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.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#286
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good at what it does. Starts quickly, doesn't get bogged down when dumping large amounts of text into it, got some nice themes. I find it a bit messy to build but I'm not exactly a compile binaries kind of person anymore so it's probably a good sign that I still manage to figure it out. If stuff like Zig is your thing you'll probably enjoy this part. My main terminal emulator is the bog slow but reliable Termina…

Ghostty is quite slow to start on my Linux machine, very close the the first start of GNOME Terminal (or Terminator). Maybe because I'm on Wayland? Are you on X?

I had this issue a few years ago with certain applications and came to find out that it had to do specifically with them using GTK. I googled for it and found the fix, and after all the same apps started practically instantly. Could this be what you're running into?

(I haven't used ghostty so I wouldn't know whether it's actually fast to start up, but what you wrote reminded me about this particular issue.)

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're all native applications.

No, they're not. Don't be pedantic that it's native because it is written in Rust or whatever, that's clearly not what was meant.

There's no single definition of native. If it's clearly not that for you, feel free to say what's the threshold you use.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tho…

While I understand that people might downvote the parent post because it seems in bad taste and touches on a culturally sensitive thing, haven't we all wondered this? Why is it that the poor give relatively more generously than the rich?

It's such an interesting phenomenon that so many ultra rich people are essentially just hoarding wealth beyond what they should reasonably be able to even have use of in multiple generations. Worse, some of them simply cannot seem to get enough and will literally commit crimes and/or do indisputably morally wrong things to get even more.

I would personally never ask anyone this, and I wouldn't expect anyone who could answer it to actually answer it, but I think what komali2 asked is one of the most interesting questions out there.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#289
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?

Charles Schwab has written (my memory) that putting one's name on the business stakes its reputation there, and such a business is theoretically more trustworthy.

Re: Ghostty is now non-profit

#290
post #233

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.

> 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.

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