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/
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
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!
It's incredible! HCB is a member run project where teens can also make their own non profits! Even Hack Clubs finances are made public at https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/
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.
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 through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
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)
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?
Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
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.
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.
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 Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3 commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.
As another person that spends the whole day in the terminal. It's sad to see there is no Windows version. I do not understand why I would need gpu acceleration for a terminal, but I would still try it.
I use a company managed/provided machine that runs windows, I do not have to bother maintaining it. All I use is basically Firefox and a MinGW to have a bash
I used iTerm2 a lot, configured it to my liking, but then I tried Ghostty for curiosity and for some reason I sticked to it. I think it's just cleaner and leaner and the default looks pretty cool and minimalistic, I don't really miss anything from iTerm.
Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid one that just works.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won? Most of the recent variations of this that come to my mind are related to cloud infrastructure. Stuff where you have serious business customers.
And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.
Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.
There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.
This highlights the value of having non-profits as a 501(c)(3). The transparency about Hack Club is refreshing.
The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
More context: 501(c)(3) orgs are non-profits that include charities, whereas 501(c)(6) orgs are non-profits with less strict requirements. Both are tax-exempt federally, but 501(c) orgs have higher financial transparency requirements and higher restrictions on political activity (which qualifies donations to 501(c)s as tax-deductible).
> The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
This was exactly my issue with the Rust Foundation back in 2021 when it was formed, 501(c)(6) are for trade organisations. To this day, individuals still CANNOT donate to the Rust Foundation which means it is not community led.
> Note: At this time, the Rust Foundation [still] does not offer individual memberships.
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.
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>
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 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.
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.
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?
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
- 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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 really hope Mitchell will continue the work of Kovid Goyal in extending and improving the VT protocols to allow building richer terminal experiences.
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/unscroll/ <- this for example makes such a difference when using multiple splits and some TUI style history search or whatever to unscroll.
> but a non-profit structure allows others to contribute financially without fear of misappropriation or misuse of funds (as protected by legal requirements and oversight from the fiscal sponsor).
None of the parenthesised provide any strong guarantees against these to alleviate such fears, are there not enough non-profits that misuse funds, say, on too high of an executive compensation instead of product development?
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
> 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
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 know),
It raises the question: Is crowding out other projects in a space, so that a billionaire can have a side project, really something we should be excited about?
Unless the software is actually good, it seems like this is just an attention suck away from better software that could use it.
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.
> 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.
Alacritty is “barebones” and doesn’t have modern features like… tabs.
Wezterm fits the vim/emacs bill of “make it whatever you want”. I want something in between - iTerm2 for 2025. Stuff like secure input on macOS is something that is just nice - it behaves like a real platform app and not jsut the lowest common denominator loosely ported.
They say in the docs it’s not the best at anything, but it’s competitive in performance, features, and extensibility and that combo is a winner for me (personally)
This is a terrible comment. Everyone should use the terminal that works for them and anyone who wants to write a terminal should do so. Ghostty is great. I’ve heard Alacritty is great.
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 ?
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.
For years people didn't care that much about specific terminal emulators or opinionated dotfiles. Now projects like Ghostty and Omarchy get tons of attention.
I get that it's probably not the projects themselves, but rather authors behind them. I'm also not saying that these projects are bad — they could be good. I don't use them, so I wouldn't know. It's just discouraging, seeing that other similar projects don't and probably won't get that traction.
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 :)
Oh good. Thank fuck that one of the dozens if not hundreds of terminal emulators isn't going to be a "rug pull".
It's a completely fucked situation when it happens to fairly unique/obscure software like say Terraform or Packer or Vagrant.
But if it happened to some software that's so common it's literally competing against built in apps on every desktop OS, I just don't know what I'd ever do
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.
"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.
It seems likely that some people have perceived what I wrote above as some kind of criticism of Ghostty or that it is now funded by a non-profit. That would be a misunderstanding [1].
Personally -- for context, not to be confused with an argument-from-authority -- I've worked in the not-for-profit sector (3+ orgs) as well as studying how to make it work better. There are people with immensely more knowledge than I, and I have learned from them, and I respect the lessons they try to convey.
In case it puts people at ease, yes, I want Ghostty to succeed. I tend to agree that a not-for-profit home is likely be a good choice, especially relative to an alternative where it might be mostly reliant on one person and/or beholden to corporate interests.
So what I am saying, at core? More or less: this is probably a good start but only a start. I am suggesting more awareness of:
1. There is a psychological tendency for people to _believe_ others who express more confidence. Being aware of this helps us notice it and prefer evidence over statements of belief.
2. What does evidence show about making OSS project succeed? Giving it a not-for-profit home seems like a good start, but how important is this relative to other choices? What does the evidence show?
To mention one place to start, here is a open-access article from the ACM that I skimmed: "Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks" [2] However, I didn't find it particularly useful in answering my #2 question above. Also the paper seemed mostly to promote a method of analysis but didn't drive towards actionable nor causal recommendations.
[1]: Maybe the misunderstanding comes from one or more of the following?
(a) halo effect (e.g. "Michael is a good guy, your words imply an indirect criticism of him");
(b) tribalism (e.g. "you are either with us or against us");
(c) timing-oriented (e.g. "this is not the time to be critical; this is a time to be jolly.");
(d) past success implies future results (e.g. "Hack Club has done well so far, trust them");
(e) tone-policing (e.g. "You seem grumpy, dude");
(f) feeling lectured-at (e.g. "You seem to act like you know things we don't.")
All of these possibilities would involve a some degree of presumption about what is appropriate and some level of disengagement with the substance of what I'm writing. Remember, we have a big tent here with room for many different points of view.
simonw|2 months ago
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...
conradev|2 months ago
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/
chrismorgan|2 months ago
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
garyhtou|2 months ago
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
dragonsenseiguy|2 months ago
throwaway290|2 months ago
It might have improved since then?
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
arjie|2 months ago
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.
jeron|2 months ago
catlover76|2 months ago
Also, didn't said company piss people off in some way that led to Open Tofu being created?
caniszczyk|2 months ago
bos|2 months ago
mindcrash|2 months ago
So thanks, IBM! <3
jarjoura|2 months ago
Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
zikduruqe|2 months ago
neural_thing|2 months ago
xrd|2 months ago
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
PNewling|2 months ago
TheRoque|2 months ago
danilafe|2 months ago
Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special about Ghostty compared to alternatives?
throwaway2037|2 months ago
Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
novella_rel|2 months ago
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.
kombine|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
cess11|2 months ago
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 Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3 commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.
jwr|2 months ago
BTW, I recently discovered shaders and cursor_blaze is absolutely awesome.
ckbkr10|2 months ago
I use a company managed/provided machine that runs windows, I do not have to bother maintaining it. All I use is basically Firefox and a MinGW to have a bash
srcreigh|2 months ago
I also like the “ghostty +list-themes” command and the splash page animation on their site.
tiborsaas|2 months ago
Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid one that just works.
simonw|2 months ago
asim|2 months ago
sevensor|2 months ago
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.
maccard|2 months ago
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.
purpleidea|2 months ago
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
simonw|2 months ago
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.
bsimpson|2 months ago
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.)
Karliss|2 months ago
And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.
Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.
There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.
RustSupremacist|2 months ago
The Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
jyunwai|2 months ago
yannoninator|2 months ago
This was exactly my issue with the Rust Foundation back in 2021 when it was formed, 501(c)(6) are for trade organisations. To this day, individuals still CANNOT donate to the Rust Foundation which means it is not community led.
> Note: At this time, the Rust Foundation [still] does not offer individual memberships.
https://rustfoundation.org/get-involved/#donations
The main issue of the Rust Foundation is that makes it easy for companies to buy influence in the project by buying a board seat as a benefit.
I agree that the Rust Foundation should change their governance structure to a 501(c)(3) instead of a 501(c)(6).
tcdent|2 months ago
Arcuru|2 months ago
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
neural_thing|2 months ago
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|2 months ago
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|2 months ago
“What the monetization strategy of Ghostty?”
“My monetization strategy is that my bank account has 10 digits in it…” lol, epic.
maxmoehl|2 months ago
> 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.
losvedir|2 months ago
shevy-java|2 months ago
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|2 months ago
helterskelter|2 months ago
mindcrash|2 months ago
Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
Hazematman|2 months ago
smw|2 months ago
sdqali|2 months ago
- 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.
loeg|2 months ago
crims0n|2 months ago
sramsay|2 months ago
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|2 months ago
But I'm using KDE anywa, and I don't care about kitty graphic protocol, I have better suited apps to watch images.
neop1x|2 months ago
tristan957|2 months ago
commandersaki|2 months ago
alkh|2 months ago
ubercow13|2 months ago
presbyterian|2 months ago
sdqali|2 months ago
> cat ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/Ghostty
#!/usr/bin/env bash
ghostty --working-directory=$(pwd)
> cat ~/.config/nautilus/scripts-accels
<Ctrl><Shift>F4 Ghostty
orbsa|2 months ago
codeptualize|2 months ago
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|2 months ago
squirrellous|2 months ago
I’d be proud if someone says that about me one day. Hope Mitchell will share the sentiment.
bilekas|2 months ago
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|2 months ago
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|2 months ago
rpastuszak|2 months ago
- 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|2 months ago
Yet, I use WezTerm, won't be switching soon.
focom|2 months ago
kccqzy|2 months ago
dagi3d|2 months ago
trueno|2 months ago
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
lillecarl|2 months ago
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/unscroll/ <- this for example makes such a difference when using multiple splits and some TUI style history search or whatever to unscroll.
rvz|2 months ago
Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned.
Reminds me of Signal.
eviks|2 months ago
None of the parenthesised provide any strong guarantees against these to alleviate such fears, are there not enough non-profits that misuse funds, say, on too high of an executive compensation instead of product development?
sadeshmukh|2 months ago
HCB staff also do not take kindly to missing receipts or fraudulent behavior.
lionkor|2 months ago
vegabook|2 months ago
rogeliodh|2 months ago
throwaway29827|2 months ago
patcon|2 months ago
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
Copenjin|2 months ago
What does he mean, isn't this what OpenAI just did, I'm confused guys
dizhn|2 months ago
alphazard|2 months ago
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 know), It raises the question: Is crowding out other projects in a space, so that a billionaire can have a side project, really something we should be excited about? Unless the software is actually good, it seems like this is just an attention suck away from better software that could use it.
GCUMstlyHarmls|2 months ago
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.
spott|2 months ago
alwillis|2 months ago
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...
maccard|2 months ago
Wezterm fits the vim/emacs bill of “make it whatever you want”. I want something in between - iTerm2 for 2025. Stuff like secure input on macOS is something that is just nice - it behaves like a real platform app and not jsut the lowest common denominator loosely ported.
They say in the docs it’s not the best at anything, but it’s competitive in performance, features, and extensibility and that combo is a winner for me (personally)
skywhopper|2 months ago
srameshc|2 months ago
simonw|2 months ago
You can run tmux inside Ghostty.
ubercore|2 months ago
alwillis|2 months ago
Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.
bmitc|2 months ago
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.
28304283409234|2 months ago
StrLght|2 months ago
For years people didn't care that much about specific terminal emulators or opinionated dotfiles. Now projects like Ghostty and Omarchy get tons of attention.
I get that it's probably not the projects themselves, but rather authors behind them. I'm also not saying that these projects are bad — they could be good. I don't use them, so I wouldn't know. It's just discouraging, seeing that other similar projects don't and probably won't get that traction.
hsbauauvhabzb|2 months ago
stephenr|2 months ago
It's a completely fucked situation when it happens to fairly unique/obscure software like say Terraform or Packer or Vagrant.
But if it happened to some software that's so common it's literally competing against built in apps on every desktop OS, I just don't know what I'd ever do
/s for anyone who needs it.
jtokoph|2 months ago
thewtf|2 months ago
noisy_boy|2 months ago
mmaunder|2 months ago
itarmonkey|2 months ago
tolerance|2 months ago
Or has this always been a thing. But it feels like a common—and celebrated—outcome for a lot of projects.
chrysoprace|2 months ago
skywhopper|2 months ago
reducesuffering|2 months ago
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)
155223|2 months ago
LennyHenrysNuts|2 months ago
Wow.
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
sethops1|2 months ago
A millionaire donating the relative equivalent would be $150.
udev4096|2 months ago
zwnow|2 months ago
[deleted]
sfn42|2 months ago
[deleted]
UPerfect|2 months ago
[deleted]
wasmainiac|2 months ago
aroman|2 months ago
xpe|2 months ago
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.
xpe|2 months ago
Personally -- for context, not to be confused with an argument-from-authority -- I've worked in the not-for-profit sector (3+ orgs) as well as studying how to make it work better. There are people with immensely more knowledge than I, and I have learned from them, and I respect the lessons they try to convey.
In case it puts people at ease, yes, I want Ghostty to succeed. I tend to agree that a not-for-profit home is likely be a good choice, especially relative to an alternative where it might be mostly reliant on one person and/or beholden to corporate interests.
So what I am saying, at core? More or less: this is probably a good start but only a start. I am suggesting more awareness of:
1. There is a psychological tendency for people to _believe_ others who express more confidence. Being aware of this helps us notice it and prefer evidence over statements of belief.
2. What does evidence show about making OSS project succeed? Giving it a not-for-profit home seems like a good start, but how important is this relative to other choices? What does the evidence show?
To mention one place to start, here is a open-access article from the ACM that I skimmed: "Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks" [2] However, I didn't find it particularly useful in answering my #2 question above. Also the paper seemed mostly to promote a method of analysis but didn't drive towards actionable nor causal recommendations.
[1]: Maybe the misunderstanding comes from one or more of the following?
(a) halo effect (e.g. "Michael is a good guy, your words imply an indirect criticism of him");
(b) tribalism (e.g. "you are either with us or against us");
(c) timing-oriented (e.g. "this is not the time to be critical; this is a time to be jolly.");
(d) past success implies future results (e.g. "Hack Club has done well so far, trust them");
(e) tone-policing (e.g. "You seem grumpy, dude");
(f) feeling lectured-at (e.g. "You seem to act like you know things we don't.")
All of these possibilities would involve a some degree of presumption about what is appropriate and some level of disengagement with the substance of what I'm writing. Remember, we have a big tent here with room for many different points of view.
[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555129
skywhopper|2 months ago
[deleted]
throwaway1389z|2 months ago
notpushkin|2 months ago
I mean, yeah, you can argue that he knew it would happen, but this way:
- he has $6B he can spend on other projects
- we have OpenTofu under LF governance, backed by virtually everybody who was using Terraform before
Win-win?