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Ghostty Terminal Emulator Transitions to Non-Profit Status (linuxiac.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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Mitchell Hashimoto, one of the founders of HashiCorp and lead developer behind Ghostty, a GPU-accelerated open-source terminal emulator launched in 2023, announced that the app has formally become a non-profit project through fiscal sponsorship by Hack Club, a registered 501(c)(3) organization.

In Ghostty’s case, Hack Club now manages compliance, donations, accounting, and public financial transparency. Hashimoto says this structure reinforces Ghostty’s commitment to remaining free and open source, provides legal assurances to users and contributors, and establishes a sustainable foundation beyond any single individual’s involvement.

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[–] 7 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Long as we've got an expert here (not sarcastic, this is cool insight, thank you) what's the downside?

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I am not the expert, but… Complexity?

    Sometimes I use Foot instead of Alacritty/Wezterm to save RAM in extreme situations. Foot's also really nice because it uses a server/client model (again, saving RAM with many terminals), though I don’t know if that’s fundamentally impossible with GPU terminals.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, complexity is a valid concern. But if your workflow stands to benefit from the performance gains, I'd say it's a worthy trade-off.

    The server/client model that Foot uses is actually pretty clever for RAM-constrained situations, especially if you're spawning tons of terminal instances. AFAIK, it's not fundamentally impossible with GPU terminals. Ghostty has single-instance mode on Linux that shares some resources, but the RAM savings aren't as dramatic because GPU terminals maintain texture buffers and rendering state in VRAM per instance.

    The catch with Foot's approach is all I/O gets multiplexed on a single thread. That's fine for lightweight usage, but for workflows like mine that involve heavy TUIs and multiple tmux sessions with dozens of windows/panes with big scrollback buffers, it becomes a bottleneck when one or more panes are flooding output from scripts/playbooks/etc.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Ghostty has single-instance mode on Linux that shares some resources.

    Oh I didn’t know this. I will have to try it sometime.

    That’s fine for lightweight usage, but for workflows like mine that involve heavy TUIs and multiple tmux sessions with dozens of windows/panes with big scrollback buffers, it becomes a bottleneck when one or more panes are flooding output from scripts/playbooks/etc.

    Yeah, for sure. Different use cases. Hence I can keep both installed, heh.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    One downside on a laptop is reduced battery life.

    I tried Ghostty briefly before, but you have to really try hard to notice preformance difference over Konsole.

    Cool idea, but not useful for those that spend all day in a terminal imnho.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Like daq mentioned, reduced battery life is one downside if you're on a laptop. RAM usage is also higher, usually 50-100MB more per instance than traditional terminals (sometimes more depending on the terminal and your config).

    In terms of Ghostty specifically, it's still a fairly young project, so the chance of hitting an edge case issue is higher than if you were using a more mature GPU-accelerated terminal.

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