Top
Best
New

Posted by vrnvu 12/3/2025

Ghostty is now non-profit(mitchellh.com)
1343 points | 289 commentspage 2
tcdent 12/3/2025|
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.
Arcuru 12/3/2025|
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

mitchellh 12/3/2025|||
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! )

komali2 12/4/2025||
> 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?

59nadir 12/4/2025||
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.

komali2 12/5/2025||
I think it might be because I'm autistic but can you help me understand why it's in bad taste to ask it? I see YouTube videos of people talking about how they became really wealthy or showing off their houses or cars, and this person was talking about his bank account directly and has mentioned the 3 comma thing before, so I'm a bit confused why it's not ok to ask more about it.

You did mention something I didn't think of which is lifetimes, I guess if someone wanted to guarantee an ultra wealthy lifestyle for all generations of their kids and grandkids forever, that would be a reason to hoard wealth into the hundreds of millions.

defen 12/3/2025|||
> don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire.

The entire point of this post is that the money is not going to him.

neural_thing 12/3/2025||
Donating in Chrome didn't work, only in Safari.

FullStory namespace conflict. Please set window["_fs_namespace"]. script.pageview-props.tagged-events.js:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error edge.fullstory.com/s/fs.js:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error ghostty:1 Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-...' from origin 'https://hcb.hackclub.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: Request header field beacon-device-instance-id is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Headers in preflight response.Understand this error installHook.js:1 Unable to Load Beacon overrideMethod @ installHook.js:1Understand this error installHook.js:1 $ overrideMethod @ installHook.js:1Understand this error d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-8f8b-be1e33945bab:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILEDUnderstand this error [Violation] Potential permissions policy violation: payment is not allowed in this document.Understand this error rs.fullstory.com/rec/page:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error 29[Intervention] Unable to preventDefault inside passive event listener due to target being treated as passive. See <URL>

garyhtou 12/4/2025|
Hi there! Gary here from HCB (Hack Club's fiscal sponsorship program).

Sorry about that! I've just pushed a fix for one of those errors. Although I wasn't able to reproduce this donation behavior on Chrome, I will continue investigating.

I appreciate you reporting this!

nodesocket 12/3/2025||
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.

maxmoehl 12/3/2025||
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.

trueno 12/3/2025||
tres commas and doors that go like this

chad

losvedir 12/3/2025||
Ha. That counts the cents, though, I assume? I didn't think Hashicorp was that big, right?
Romario77 12/3/2025|||
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.

nodesocket 12/3/2025||||
Shockingly I believe billionaire with a B. They timed the acquisition nearly perfect in terms of market conditions. Tres comma club!!!
bombcar 12/4/2025||
Loving the idea that he got a bank transfer for $1b and it’s still just sitting there in his checking account.
nodesocket 12/4/2025||
I would assume it's not sitting in his checking account. He hopefully has wealth advisors; earning interest, investments, tax strategies. Mitchell is super smart, so almost certainly not sitting in a checking account.
asadm 12/3/2025|||
was that big
shevy-java 12/4/2025||
Can someone translate this for me? I understand he explained the rationale. I am not sure I understood it though.

The biggest question I have right now is: why does it matter that a terminal is a non-profit? I think I am missing some pieces of the puzzle right now.

AndyKelley 12/4/2025|
Imagine you have a thriving, successful open source project with many users. Eventually, you want to move on to other things, but you don't want the project to die, or to be absorbed into AWS. Furthermore, you have a bunch of contributors who could really use financial support in order to sustain their efforts. What's your strategy?
akho 12/4/2025||
I don't know. What are other terminal emulators doing?
helterskelter 12/3/2025||
Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?
mindcrash 12/3/2025||
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.

Hazematman 12/4/2025|||
My biggest reason for using it over gnome terminal is osc52 support https://ali.anari.io/posts/osc52/ which lets you copy paste using a escape sequence. Meaning you can copy paste when ssh'ed into another machine. Gnome terminal doesn't support this currently and there is a discussion on whether they will because of security concerns https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2495
smw 12/3/2025|||
It's very fast and has a lot of work to show correctness.
sdqali 12/4/2025|||
- 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.

akho 12/4/2025||
the edit is not true. footclient is, like, right there.
celrod 12/4/2025|||
I use niri and footclient -N, so builtin window and tab completion don't appeal to be.

Foot feels fast, but I've not actually measured the latency. It also seems to use less CPU than GPU accelerated terminals (which it isn't) from just glancing at btop. So I'm not sold on GPU-acceleration as a feature unless I see benchmarks demonstrating the value in improved latency and reduced CPU use compared to foot

I love that foot's scrollback search, selection expansive, and copy can be entirely keyboard driven. Huge QoL feature for me that often seems neglected to me in other terminals.

sdqali 12/4/2025|||
I had never tried footclient. Thank you for the correction.
loeg 12/3/2025|||
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.
crims0n 12/3/2025|||
One fun thing, it supports shaders: https://catskull.net/fun-with-ghostty-shaders.html
sramsay 12/3/2025|||
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.

dmytrokow 12/3/2025|||
FWIW, I found no reason to switch from Konsole.

But I'm using KDE anywa, and I don't care about kitty graphic protocol, I have better suited apps to watch images.

neop1x 12/3/2025|||
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.
alwillis 12/4/2025|||
> 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...

neop1x 12/5/2025|||
Can ghostty finally search in the scrollback? The last time I tried it it didn't support a freaking search. This is #1 feature I need from any terminal.
a96 12/4/2025||||
No sign of alacritty :(
akho 12/4/2025|||
Have you read the post you linked, and do you understand what it is about?
tristan957 12/3/2025||||
I use Ghostty because it is a native application, and it looks great on macOS and GNOME. WezTerm, Kitty, and Foot don't do that for me. Foot is great though.
NoGravitas 12/4/2025|||
After some update, Ghostty stopped working on Gnome+Mesa on older Intel graphics (IvyBridge). It doesn't really feel native to me if it doesn't run everywhere the toolkit it uses runs. I understand the reasons, but it leaves a sour taste.
viraptor 12/4/2025|||
They're all native applications.
saagarjha 12/4/2025||
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.
viraptor 12/4/2025||
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.
saagarjha 12/7/2025||
Using the platform native UI toolkit
coastalpuma 12/4/2025|||
Wezterm is an excellent project but it doesn't have native UI chrome like Ghostty does.
tristan957 12/3/2025|||
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.
WhyNotHugo 12/3/2025||
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.
commandersaki 12/3/2025||
Yes, because Ghostty is a fiscally sponsored non-profit.
tristan957 12/3/2025||
The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit as well.
alkh 12/3/2025||
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!
ubercow13 12/3/2025||
You can set a keyboard shortcut for that GUI menu entry (and most others) in macOS system settings.
presbyterian 12/3/2025|||
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)
sdqali 12/4/2025|||
This can be done through Nautilus scripts.

> cat ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/Ghostty

#!/usr/bin/env bash

ghostty --working-directory=$(pwd)

> cat ~/.config/nautilus/scripts-accels

<Ctrl><Shift>F4 Ghostty

alkh 12/5/2025||
Thanks, looks cool but not available for OSX (:
orbsa 12/3/2025||
Can you not bind the command "open ." to a keybind through Ghostty?
duskwuff 12/3/2025|||
Wrong direction. OP wants to open Ghostty from a Finder window, not vice versa.
tomjakubowski 12/3/2025|||
I think they are looking for the opposite: open a Ghostty window from Finder.
alkh 12/3/2025||
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)
codeptualize 12/3/2025||
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!

lvl155 12/4/2025||
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.
squirrellous 12/5/2025|
> 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.

bilekas 12/3/2025||
After hearing about Bun today, this is such a curveball. Ironic as it is in this 'get big enough to sell' ethos mentality that seems to be prevalent, this is what I would have expected from Bun.

I like Ghostty, don't get a chance to use it enough but everyone I know loves it, this is so cool to hear.

> Being non-profit clearly demonstrates our commitment to keeping Ghostty free and open source for everyone

I do hope the creators and maintainers get something good though. Open source work seems majority ignored to me at least, and admittedly by me too most of the time.

notpushkin 12/4/2025|
> this is what I would have expected from Bun

Alas, Bun is a VC-backed startup. Having $7m in funding is great, but it does come with some strings attached.

But maybe now Bun founders can start a nonprofit project of their own!

VerifiedReports 12/3/2025|
Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer over the Mac's Terminal, for example?
rpastuszak 12/3/2025||
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

jeanlucas 12/3/2025|||
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.

focom 12/3/2025|||
One personal gripe: Compared to the default terminal, ghostty, close the terminal on ctrl+d.
hamburglar 12/3/2025|||
Good. That weird “keep the window open after ctrl+d” behavior is annoying.
coder543 12/3/2025||||
Terminal.app also closes the window when the shell exits if you change a setting: Settings -> Profiles -> Shell -> When the shell exits -> Close the window
Xiol 12/3/2025|||
People use something other than CTRL-D to exit their terminal?
kergonath 12/3/2025|||
Command-Q? Or command-W to close only the current window.
dbacar 12/3/2025||||
i type exit
VerifiedReports 12/3/2025||
Same. I didn't know Ctrl-D did anything.
quesera 12/3/2025|||
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 right now, 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)

VerifiedReports 12/3/2025|||
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

bombcar 12/4/2025|||
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.
dbacar 12/4/2025|||
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.

:)

fragmede 12/4/2025||
Remap caps-lock to be ctrl to save yourself from RSI.
dbacar 12/5/2025||
too old to remap my brain :D
eviks 12/4/2025|||
Yes, of course, many people use the same shortcut for the same action in all the apps
kccqzy 12/3/2025||
It’s just faster when you accidentally dump large amount of text or binary onto the Terminal. You can measure this by running `time cat` on a multi-gigabyte file and observing the wall clock time.
More comments...