Ghostty is now non-profit
mitchellh.com208 points by vrnvu an hour ago
208 points by vrnvu an hour ago
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/
Cool. I hadn't heard of it before. What advantages does it offer over the Mac's Terminal, for example?
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.
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.
"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. :)
Fourteen additional people funding it as of this announcement: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions
Is there a compelling reason to use ghostty on Linux, over say, gnome-terminal or foot?
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.
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'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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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?
Shockingly I believe billionaire with a B. They timed the acquisition nearly perfect in terms of market conditions. Tres comma club!!!
Smart decision and makes sense.
Lowers the risk of a rug pull or the project becoming suddenly abandoned.
Reminds me of Signal.
...and another $150k from my family...
Wow.