zlacker

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.

>>bos+(OP)
"sustainable foundation" it's still one guy funding it, no? seems as sustainable as before

>>neural+N1
33 additional people funding it as of this announcement: https://hcb.hackclub.com/ghostty/transactions

>>bos+(OP)
Good. Maybe they'll add search to the terminal now. /s

>>zikdur+z2
https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1993728538344906978 - "Ghostty on macOS now has search [...] GTK to follow soon" - November 26th 2025

>>neural+N1
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. :)

>>simonw+63
GTK is also merged. Main branch has search. Its also exposed via libghostty for embedders.

>>bos+(OP)
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

>>simonw+63
But only in the the tip (nightly) build. I'm somewhat tempted to switch to them for this.

>>mindcr+lb
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.

>>veverk+ni
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.

>>veverk+ni
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)

>>neural+N1
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.

>>zikdur+z2
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...

>>anorwe+Qg
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.

>>mindcr+lb
I'd rather he'd still be working on Nomad to be honest, but Ghostty is a good consolation prize ;)

>>cpach+Ln
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...

>>zikdur+z2
A little unfair that this is downvoted. No search is like a dealbreaker for me. I'm happy with iTerm and for 99% of my use cases I don't need a "very fast" terminal. Thanks for pointing this out.

Seems I will wait a little longer before search is in the regular build (and not nightly ones)

>>therea+eF
Ghostty 1.3 will release in March.

>>bos+(OP)
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.

>>jarjou+MQ
moonlighting is permitted by law in California (companies legally can't prevent you from doing it, iiuc), as long as there's no conflict of interest with your main job...

>>neural+N1
To be fair, that one guy happens to be the OG Mitchell Hashimoto, who's worth a giant pile of money from selling terraform to IBM, and he's the guy actually writing it in the first place, so I don't think that's, like, a terrible horrible no good issue.

>>yalok+uW
As long as you don't use their hardware to do it.

>>mindcr+lb
IBM did not do that, HashiCorp was a public company before their acquisition.

>>mindcr+yk
>The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate."

Having money doesn't mean that you'll have the motivation to continue working on something for free forever.

>>yalok+uW
"no conflict of interest" is basically meaningless if your day job is writing software. These clauses you sign are quite broad in what that scope of conflict could be.

Every company I've worked for has had very explicit rules that say, you must get written permission from someone at some director or VP level sign off on your "side project," open source or not.

You might want to check your company guidelines around this just to make sure you're safe.

>>fragme+xY
that goes without saying, but it's still not free permission when you use your own stuff.

>>charci+v31
Free work is the most rewarding work on every metric but monetization in my experience, and when you hit road bumps you can pay your way out of it to keep going. Sounds like the literal dream

>>bdcrav+Km
But when you already have money, you can skip the “how can I work on this and not starve to death?” part.

>>mindcr+yk
Tres Commas!

>>jarjou+W91
Side projects that aren't a conflict of interest when working at Google is rather limiting. Likely less so for small companies.

>>mindcr+yk
I didn't think it was possible for anyone to express this thought more obnoxiously than DHH but here we are.

>>cholan+Vk1
The obnoxious one here is the person obsessed with monetization, not the person who throws their ignorance back in their face. Every hobby these days has to be monetized; it's fucking gross.

>>lillec+Ra1
Without turning this into a brag session, this is my experience. I don't have to worry about money anymore, so I get to work on cool projects at my own pace, do things that probably sound pointless to most, and it doesn't matter if it's successful. The important thing is that I'm interested.

I'm not as talented as Mitchell tho.

>>jarjou+MQ
> 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.

You break out of the cycle by selling your HCOL home and moving to LCOL after a few years. That HCOL home will have appreciated fast enough given the original purchase price that the growth alone would easily pay for a comparable home in a LCOL area. This is the story of my village in Texas, where Cali people have been buying literal mansions after moving out of their shitboxes in LA and the Bay Area.

>>cholan+Vk1
Is DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) worth 100M USD? Google results say he is worth about 50M USD... so "only" two commas.

>>lillec+Ra1
There are a ton of different projects one can devote free work to. Eventually one will get bored and want to change things up.

>>kyrra+kj1
Not really, in my personal experience and per my friends, most of big companies are pretty lenient about it, except for Apple.

>>memco+8v
Ah. Cool!

>>cholan+Vk1
I think the bigger thing here is that even with three commas in his bank account he lacks the good sense to not associate with DHH.

>>throwa+fs1
Three comma club is for billionaires.

>>cpach+Ln
If you need to do that again note that there is asdf plugin as well ;-)

For Linux compiling is actually the only way to get tip.

>>mindcr+lb
I always feel weird thanking IBM. On one hand, they've funded numerous FOSS projects, and made the thinkpad, an amazing CPU architecture (PPC), and seem to be the only ones actually innovating in the tech space sometimes. On the other hand, they bought Redhat and seem actively hostile to any FOSS projects that don't make them money

>>yalok+uu1
No, they're pretty strict. It just changes what you are allowed to do, with Apple being very restrictive in not letting you do it at all.

>>KPGv2+kr1
Eh; it's maybe dumb to suggest the only way for a project to be sustainable is to monetize it, but responding with "I'm rich, you peasant, I'm above such concerns" is infinitely worse.