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 Club must have this down to a very fine art.
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. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/
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.
Self-plug, but consider Handmade Cities. We have a simple meetups [0] page if you decide you appreciate our ethos. Hopefully we have an active location for you.
In any case, good luck on finding the right community!
I love seeing PSF support the community with fiscal sponsorship! It makes such a huge difference for these open source projects and meetups, letting them focus on software and community rather than the legal/financial back-office work.
Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
Inspired by this I just posted a resonably niche feature request to the Ghostty discussion forum (copy and paste to support text/rtf)... and found out within half an hour that the equivalent of what I was asking for was already available on their main branch: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9798
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.
Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.
Rather thank IBM for paying Mitchell an outrageous amount of money for Hashicorp, so he can devote all of his time on awesome projects like Ghostty without ever thinking about sustainable income ever again.
While you're not wrong, I think this undersells a little how much Mitchell has given of his time to OSS. Yes, he's fortunate that he doesn't have to worry about money, but even when he did, he still contributed openly and freely.
That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first place - giving back.
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."
Money begets the freedom to work on causes. Monetization was always a core part of Hashicorp, rather than being a bolt-on after years of OSS. Which is a good thing. (I was a customer of the first commercial offering from Hashicorp, their VMWare add-on for Vagrant)
I'm hoping they'll get around to supporting command-number for switching between windows[0]. command-` is fine but clunky as hell when you have more than three or four windows. Without command-number, I'm still stuck using iTerm2 as my daily driver.
(It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI conventions[1] too)
You can't build a house without the foundation (pun intended).
I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is.
All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't.
I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
How do you expect that to change? What is the next step in your mind? Maybe asking for donations? If only he would set up some way that the general public could contribute money to the project! That’d be the smart thing to do. Then he could write a blog post about it, and maybe someone would post a link to HN. That’d really be something.
I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for these new CLIs.
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
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.
This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free.
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
On the other hand having a copyleft license without CLA makes rug pulls nearly impossible (once there are multiple contributors and copyright holders).
But you are right, from a (commercial) value perspective, permissive wins.
It's sad, people have really been shitting on copyleft licenses the past few years, when they are critical to ensuring our computing freedoms are preserved.
Copyleft protects the user. The friction is, like you said, by design. It ensures that something that started free, stays free, and can't be rug pulled out from under you.
Big monied interests have been trying, and succeeding, in changing the discourse around free software away from free and to simply just "open source" and moving toward permissive licenses, specifically so community effort can be extracted and monetized without contributing back.
I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...
Keep in mind that Linux doesn’t use the GPL3 and stuck with the GPL2 since the maintainers and Linus Torvalds thought that it was overly restrictive [1]. So at some point the license friction becomes too large to be practical for organizations to use or contribute to.
I'd be really interested in hearing more about that argument.
I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.
BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who published it is one of the few people who has actually been involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided copyleft licenses are a false goal.
(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)
> 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.
What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys
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 making the window disappear. :)
(Note though -- I can't find it in Terminal.app settings, but there must be a way to change the behaviour to close the window instead. Mine is configured that way, but it's not the default)
I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.
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 strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
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 project, then don't! Don't let anyone bully you (me, the person I'm responding to, or anyone else) into what you should and shouldn't charitably support. Enjoy.
(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! )
I really love Ghostty. Thanks to it, my comeback to (n)vim has been quite smooth. Keybindings with the CMD key works right away without having to send any escape sequence or similar. It just works™
ive found ghostty to be a pretty decent replacement for iterm2, some bugs still being worked out and i havent always had the best luck with the guake dropdown style terminal but all in all it's pretty nice. sort of miss the additional hot-key invoking options iterm2 had (i could double tap control or cmd to invoke) and ghostty is a lil more limited there, but overall its solid, doesn't feel bloated. iterm2's settings gui was a total tragedy. there was some xterm related issue i ran into ssh'ing into a vps but i can't even remember for the life of me what that was.
There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0.
Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
gnome-terminal still writes out its scrollback history to the filesystem, potentially on-disk and not just tmpfs. It uses encryption to obfuscate that these days, but, it's still pretty weird behavior. Its performance is also relatively poor.
The only thing I am missing now from Ghostty is being able to open it in any open Finder folder with a keyboard shortcut(like standard Ubuntu terminal). Ghostty already provides Finder-specific GUI shortcut but you need to use a mouse. Otherwise, stellar work(especially the ease of configuring it) and congrats to everyone involved!
I do this with an Alfred workflow, I hit command+space and then type “ft” and it opens the front most Finder window’s directory in Terminal (or iTerm, you can set it to whatever)
Yeah, exactly, like Ctrl+Alt+T opening Xterm in Ubuntu. If I am not mistaken, if you have a file explorer open it will automatically open terminal in that specific folder(i.e. kind of like `cd`ing there first)
This seems really nice. Wasn't aware of hack club but that just looks like a wonderful construction and organization.
In a world of VC backed open source projects with big profit motivations, it's refreshing to see things like this. Definitely going to give ghostty another try!
I never realize Ghostty is a project by Mitchell Hashimoto. I am very happy with tmux and never seriously looked at it , now I really curious what is it about and how it is different than say tmux ?
Non-profits allow projects to grow beyond hobbies. Covering costs (whether that's the expense of hosting / running the project or hiring talented people to work on it) is going to be a better incentive to keep the projects alive in the long term, meaning that people can rely on them instead of being wary that the project might become abandonware in a year.
> 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.
Hey articles like this could get some value with a two liner about what the tool is, tty can mean several things, so clearly stating its function would help gain additional users that aren’t already familiar with your product :)
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.
"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. The structure legally binds Ghostty to the public-benefit purpose it was created to serve."
I mean, after the OpenAI debacle, surely this type of assurance doesn't hold much weight anymore? (Though Ghostty is ofc very unlikely to pull shenanigans)
> I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit.
One of my pet peeves is people trotting out “I believe” statements. (Usually) I care much more about the evidence that backs the belief than the belief.
Putting aside my cantankerousness, I am glad Michael believes in setting up good incentives for the organization that will manage Ghostty. (But being glad right now doesn’t count for much.)
At a deeper level, my more
precise complaint is people broadcasting “I believe” statements as if doing so should persuade us. It should not. “I believe” statements may often be personal and genuine, but they are so easily abused that perhaps they should be enumerated among the dark patterns of rhetoric.
(There are some ridiculous quote from the first episode of Silicon Valley by Mike Judge that pokes fun at the zealotry behind belief, but I can’t quote it off the top of my head.)
In the case of software projects with broad benefits that want continuity over a long period of time, I want to agree that the not-for-profit structure is a good choice and often than the alternatives. But I don’t know that this has been carefully studied.
My hunch would be there are stronger causal predictors such as governance mechanisms. Choosing an organization form is just step one. Smart governance, and long-term execution can only be shown with time.
Individuals with unaligned incentives will challenge any organization’s set of rules. In the same way that our immune system has to evolve over time to win, organizational rules at all levels have to evolve.
Also, I do think there’s a lot of opportunity for smarter legal structures after the machinations pulled by OpenAI.
Why do you assume Mitchell is just doing this without any research or reasoning? From what I know of him, it’s surely the opposite.
Your laundry list of everything that might possibly go wrong with an open software project is not exactly useful. There is no legal structure that can protect from all bad actors forever.
But the good news is that if you hate this, you can fork the code and set up your own perfect legal entity to solve all the problems only you can see! Enjoy!
Monetary independent person announcing his side project which is just a teletypewriter and basically has no infra costs is now non-profit. More news at 10...
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 Club must have this down to a very fine art.
I wrote a bit more about PSF fiscal sponsorship here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...
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. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/
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.
Seconding this. I pivoted to tech in my early 30s and feel I've missed out on a lot of community building opportunities.
Recurse Center might be a good option https://www.recurse.com
Self-plug, but consider Handmade Cities. We have a simple meetups [0] page if you decide you appreciate our ethos. Hopefully we have an active location for you.
In any case, good luck on finding the right community!
[0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups
I love seeing PSF support the community with fiscal sponsorship! It makes such a huge difference for these open source projects and meetups, letting them focus on software and community rather than the legal/financial back-office work.
Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
oh, and while it's on my mind, the codebase was open-sourced earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802), and we just launched a mobile app yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402
Inspired by this I just posted a resonably niche feature request to the Ghostty discussion forum (copy and paste to support text/rtf)... and found out within half an hour that the equivalent of what I was asking for was already available on their main branch: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9798
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.
Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.
Rather thank IBM for paying Mitchell an outrageous amount of money for Hashicorp, so he can devote all of his time on awesome projects like Ghostty without ever thinking about sustainable income ever again.
So thanks, IBM! <3
While you're not wrong, I think this undersells a little how much Mitchell has given of his time to OSS. Yes, he's fortunate that he doesn't have to worry about money, but even when he did, he still contributed openly and freely.
That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first place - giving back.
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 come from.
Money begets the freedom to work on causes. Monetization was always a core part of Hashicorp, rather than being a bolt-on after years of OSS. Which is a good thing. (I was a customer of the first commercial offering from Hashicorp, their VMWare add-on for Vagrant)
I'd rather he'd still be working on Nomad to be honest, but Ghostty is a good consolation prize ;)
Good. Maybe they'll add search to the terminal now. /s
https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 - "Ghostty on macOS now has search [...] GTK to follow soon" - November 26th 2025
GTK is also merged. Main branch has search. Its also exposed via libghostty for embedders.
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'd like you can also use `tip` as the update channel to get the nightly build binary without having to compile it yourself: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#auto-update-channe...
I'm hoping they'll get around to supporting command-number for switching between windows[0]. command-` is fine but clunky as hell when you have more than three or four windows. Without command-number, I'm still stuck using iTerm2 as my daily driver.
(It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI conventions[1] too)
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/8131
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
"sustainable foundation" it's still one guy funding it, no? seems as sustainable as before
You can't build a house without the foundation (pun intended).
I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is.
All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't.
I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
33 additional people funding it as of this announcement: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions
How do you expect that to change? What is the next step in your mind? Maybe asking for donations? If only he would set up some way that the general public could contribute money to the project! That’d be the smart thing to do. Then he could write a blog post about it, and maybe someone would post a link to HN. That’d really be something.
I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for these new CLIs.
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
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.
This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free.
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world.
I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number of people.
On the other hand having a copyleft license without CLA makes rug pulls nearly impossible (once there are multiple contributors and copyright holders). But you are right, from a (commercial) value perspective, permissive wins.
> Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world.
That "friction" is by design. It prevents someone else from screwing over the users.
The people that oppose copyleft are those it was specifically design to protect against.
It's sad, people have really been shitting on copyleft licenses the past few years, when they are critical to ensuring our computing freedoms are preserved.
Copyleft protects the user. The friction is, like you said, by design. It ensures that something that started free, stays free, and can't be rug pulled out from under you.
Big monied interests have been trying, and succeeding, in changing the discourse around free software away from free and to simply just "open source" and moving toward permissive licenses, specifically so community effort can be extracted and monetized without contributing back.
I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...
Keep in mind that Linux doesn’t use the GPL3 and stuck with the GPL2 since the maintainers and Linus Torvalds thought that it was overly restrictive [1]. So at some point the license friction becomes too large to be practical for organizations to use or contribute to.
[1] https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU
I'd be really interested in hearing more about that argument.
I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.
BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who published it is one of the few people who has actually been involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided copyleft licenses are a false goal.
You should watch his talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g
(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)
> 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.
What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys
No way! You need to incorporate a whole other company for that. By the way, it's a terminal emulator. I think we'll be fine if they pull the rug.
Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer over the Mac's Terminal, for example?
For me:
- easy to customise using a simple, easy to understand config
- supports non-native full screen so I don’t need to wait for the virtual desktop transition animation on Mac to finish…
- has a friendly community
- it’s a good model for building sustainable products/tools
and, with all of the above: it doesn’t feel like a compromise
Against Mac's terminal I'd recommend ghostty. Just the support for more characters and better defaults are a good reason.
Yet, I use WezTerm, won't be switching soon.
One personal gripe: Compared to the default terminal, ghostty, close the terminal on ctrl+d.
Good. That weird “keep the window open after ctrl+d” behavior is annoying.
People use something other than CTRL-D to exit their terminal?
i type exit
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 making the window disappear. :)
(Note though -- I can't find it in Terminal.app settings, but there must be a way to change the behaviour to close the window instead. Mine is configured that way, but it's not the default)
Thanks. It exists, and I found that I already have it active. In Settings, it's under Profiles / Shell and the control is
When the shell exits: - Close if the shell existed cleanly
Command-Q? Or command-W to close only the current window.
I'm making an effort to support Open Source projects that I use everyday; much in the way I support creators on YouTube via Patreon with small monthly commitments, so it's a welcome opportunity that GhosTTY has made that easy to accomplish.
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 strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
Original post: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
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 project, then don't! Don't let anyone bully you (me, the person I'm responding to, or anyone else) into what you should and shouldn't charitably support. Enjoy.
(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! )
I really love Ghostty. Thanks to it, my comeback to (n)vim has been quite smooth. Keybindings with the CMD key works right away without having to send any escape sequence or similar. It just works™
ive found ghostty to be a pretty decent replacement for iterm2, some bugs still being worked out and i havent always had the best luck with the guake dropdown style terminal but all in all it's pretty nice. sort of miss the additional hot-key invoking options iterm2 had (i could double tap control or cmd to invoke) and ghostty is a lil more limited there, but overall its solid, doesn't feel bloated. iterm2's settings gui was a total tragedy. there was some xterm related issue i ran into ssh'ing into a vps but i can't even remember for the life of me what that was.
i didnt even consider that having to configure everything with a config file allows apps like this https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config to exist. neat
i agree, you can search in the terminal like you can iterm2 either, which is super annoying.
Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?
While foot focuses on minimalism, Ghostty brings along a shit ton of features like support for Kitty's (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) graphics protocol (in terminal images! - https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/), advanced window management (windows, tabs, splits) and OpenGL pixelshaders (https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html)
Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
One fun thing, it supports shaders: https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html
It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.
There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0.
Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
gnome-terminal still writes out its scrollback history to the filesystem, potentially on-disk and not just tmpfs. It uses encryption to obfuscate that these days, but, it's still pretty weird behavior. Its performance is also relatively poor.
Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.
The only thing I am missing now from Ghostty is being able to open it in any open Finder folder with a keyboard shortcut(like standard Ubuntu terminal). Ghostty already provides Finder-specific GUI shortcut but you need to use a mouse. Otherwise, stellar work(especially the ease of configuring it) and congrats to everyone involved!
I do this with an Alfred workflow, I hit command+space and then type “ft” and it opens the front most Finder window’s directory in Terminal (or iTerm, you can set it to whatever)
You can set a keyboard shortcut for that GUI menu entry (and most others) in macOS system settings.
Can you not bind the command "open ." to a keybind through Ghostty?
Wrong direction. OP wants to open Ghostty from a Finder window, not vice versa.
I think they are looking for the opposite: open a Ghostty window from Finder.
Yeah, exactly, like Ctrl+Alt+T opening Xterm in Ubuntu. If I am not mistaken, if you have a file explorer open it will automatically open terminal in that specific folder(i.e. kind of like `cd`ing there first)
This seems really nice. Wasn't aware of hack club but that just looks like a wonderful construction and organization.
In a world of VC backed open source projects with big profit motivations, it's refreshing to see things like this. Definitely going to give ghostty another try!
I never realize Ghostty is a project by Mitchell Hashimoto. I am very happy with tmux and never seriously looked at it , now I really curious what is it about and how it is different than say tmux ?
It's not an alternative to tmux, it's an alternative to the macOS Terminal.app or iTerm2.
You can run tmux inside Ghostty.
To be fair, you can also run tmux inside tmux (inside Zellij, inside another tmux, inside screen, etc). :)
For those who will read this literally, it works fine on linux as well.
It's a terminal, not a multiplexer. Different type of product.
Is anyone opposed or at least of two minds concerning what could be described as the bureaucratization of FOSS?
Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.
Non-profits allow projects to grow beyond hobbies. Covering costs (whether that's the expense of hosting / running the project or hiring talented people to work on it) is going to be a better incentive to keep the projects alive in the long term, meaning that people can rely on them instead of being wary that the project might become abandonware in a year.
Ever heard of the Free Software Foundation? Apache Software Foundation? FreeBSD Foundation? Linux Foundation?
Yeah, you named some heavy hitters. Attract a lotta interests.
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.
Ha. That counts the cents, though, I assume? I didn't think Hashicorp was that big, right?
Hashicorp was sold for 6.5B to IBM.
Another thing - when it went public it was valued at 13B and Hashimoto owned 8.5% of it according to the filing.
So, depending on when he sold or converted his shares it is pretty plausible that he got a billion.
Shockingly I believe billionaire with a B. They timed the acquisition nearly perfect in terms of market conditions. Tres comma club!!!
was that big
we got hack club sponsorship in HS. Sanil chawla is a great guy
Smart decision and makes sense.
Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned.
Reminds me of Signal.
Hey articles like this could get some value with a two liner about what the tool is, tty can mean several things, so clearly stating its function would help gain additional users that aren’t already familiar with your product :)
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.
"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. The structure legally binds Ghostty to the public-benefit purpose it was created to serve."
I mean, after the OpenAI debacle, surely this type of assurance doesn't hold much weight anymore? (Though Ghostty is ofc very unlikely to pull shenanigans)
> I believe infrastructure of this kind should be stewarded by a mission-driven, non-commercial entity that prioritizes public benefit over private profit.
One of my pet peeves is people trotting out “I believe” statements. (Usually) I care much more about the evidence that backs the belief than the belief.
Putting aside my cantankerousness, I am glad Michael believes in setting up good incentives for the organization that will manage Ghostty. (But being glad right now doesn’t count for much.)
At a deeper level, my more precise complaint is people broadcasting “I believe” statements as if doing so should persuade us. It should not. “I believe” statements may often be personal and genuine, but they are so easily abused that perhaps they should be enumerated among the dark patterns of rhetoric.
(There are some ridiculous quote from the first episode of Silicon Valley by Mike Judge that pokes fun at the zealotry behind belief, but I can’t quote it off the top of my head.)
In the case of software projects with broad benefits that want continuity over a long period of time, I want to agree that the not-for-profit structure is a good choice and often than the alternatives. But I don’t know that this has been carefully studied.
My hunch would be there are stronger causal predictors such as governance mechanisms. Choosing an organization form is just step one. Smart governance, and long-term execution can only be shown with time.
Individuals with unaligned incentives will challenge any organization’s set of rules. In the same way that our immune system has to evolve over time to win, organizational rules at all levels have to evolve.
Also, I do think there’s a lot of opportunity for smarter legal structures after the machinations pulled by OpenAI.
Why do you assume Mitchell is just doing this without any research or reasoning? From what I know of him, it’s surely the opposite.
Your laundry list of everything that might possibly go wrong with an open software project is not exactly useful. There is no legal structure that can protect from all bad actors forever.
But the good news is that if you hate this, you can fork the code and set up your own perfect legal entity to solve all the problems only you can see! Enjoy!
...and another $150k from my family...
Wow.
Not to dismiss the generosity, but he's a billionaire.
A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.
Monetary independent person announcing his side project which is just a teletypewriter and basically has no infra costs is now non-profit. More news at 10...
Your right! Strange. I thought I commented this to the Seattle thread… bug?
Did you post this comment on the wrong article? Nothing here has anything to do with AI whatsoever.