Wow, I wonder what his everyday life must be like.

Also, in real life, he's a genuine nice guy. I had lunch with him and Armon at a conference when they worked at Kiip, before they founded Hashicorp. Mitchell (to me) was the proper hacker. He just loved everything about computing. This particular conference was about distributed systems and he was just geeking out on everything.

I walked away thinking that no matter what they did, they'd probably be successful. I was extremely happy to find Ghostty and have been using it ever since.

100% Legend love Ghostty btw :)

> - No ⌘. sending CTRL-C (muscle memory and being advertised as native to the Mac is what one would expect).

For what it's worth, that shortcut also doesn't work in the Jetbrains terminal, Alacritty, Kitty, and even iTerm2. The only terminal emulator I've tried so far where that works is the built-in Terminal.app.

Interesting, I really prefer the font rendering in Ghostty! I'm with you on the first two items, though.

Despite these shortcomings I still use it daily since the first time I tried it, and have come to really love the project in general. I often won't hop to new software if it offers friction like this, but Ghostty pulled me in despite some snags.

Zed is also wonderful software, though it took me way longer to commit to using it daily.

I started using it months ago and don't miss that so much, if I really can't rerun the command and pipe it to less/grep. I'll just use the mouse to copy it to the clipboard and then run `xclip -o` (linux) or `pbpaste` (mac) and pipe it to grep. I know there's a keybinding for putting the buffer in a file, but copying with the mouse is faster than finding it.

Also, not sure if this is by default or it picked it up from my old iTerm2 configuration, but cmd+shift+up/down navigates through prompt lines so it's easy to find the start of a long command. My PS1 in zsh is:

    PS1='%1~ %F{green}»%f '

You could run tmux inside it and bind cmd f to copy-mode + /

the second bullet single-handedly keeps me in WezTerm (copy/select mode)

I just want to say, what a dream. To have wealth and be able to create projects for the sake of going the projects. To not have to make the concessions of quality for profits.

There's an old Knuth quote:

  > In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.

And I think we're seeing more and more that these projects made with love are successful. That without the hyper fixation on money we can build good projects that make big changes in a world.

In some sense I'm a bit envious of Mitchell but truthfully these types of things make me more question how we've constructed our society and economy. It shouldn't require one to start with wealth to be able to build things that have such an impact. What needs to be changed where we can live up to what Knuth proclaimed. I'm sure all of us have had experiences where were we given the time (and usually not much) we could make things so much better. But we make many sacrifices when we rush. Which leads to more good advice by Knuth

  > If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

At what point do we push back? We see that the people we really look up to did things so differently. Knuth himself expressed how detail obsessed he was, and such a claim is common among the grey breads. Of course, things change, but are we creating a world with no wizards? Are we creating a world where we reward people for solving problems and making our lives easier? Or are we just maximizing some score of a pointless game?

I'd love to live in a world with a thousand more Mitchells, following their passions without the burden of needing to justify decisions to a board who has no interest in quality. How do we create that world?

Like you said, what a legend. But, how do we make more legends?

And hacking on tty software too, the geekiest corner of the Unix tech stack.

I love ghostty and use it daily, somehow I missed it was by Mitchell Hashimoto! Very cool to see.

Basically MariaDB. He (original creator of MySQL) sold MySQL for a Billion dollars (iirc) forked it, created MariaDB and kept at it. It's been what 15 years now?

You made me look into HashiCorp again. It's a great company from a developers perspective, in terms of the many useful tools created: Vagrant, Packer, Nomad, Consul, etc

However their financials are... LOL

Revenue US$583 million (2024)

Operating income US$−254 million (2024)

50% loss margin :-)))

It doesn’t (look like a go layout) and that’s a good thing because pkg/ src/ etc aren’t good go directories.

What exactly does it do better than iTerm2? I gave it a try a few weeks ago and wasn't at all impressed, but maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.

> No ⌘. sending CTRL-C

This comment sounded familiar[0]. :) For what it's worth, still possible with:

  keybind = "cmd+.=text:\x03"

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42889411

Search in scroll back is coming in 1.3, unfortunately that's going to be 6 months away.

There's a lot happening in the Ghostty app though, check out the 1.2 release notes

By the rollercoaster of points this post is experiencing, I may have expressed myself poorly. To be clear, the concept of a modern, cross-platform Terminal core with native GUI implementations for each major vendor is amazing and I'm very glad it exists. It's just not quite there yet for me and I don't know if it ever will be. But I'm very excited by it and hopeful.

Should be soon: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

A few other ugly quirks in Linux:

- It doesn’t respect the user’s configured fonts. - Clipboard support is inconsistent. - The GTK4 UI is quirky, and has silly slow animations in situations which don’t make sense.

The first two sound like more serious issues, and I’m surprised that others haven’t found them dealbreakers.

It's on the roadmap: https://ghostty.org/docs/install/release-notes/1-2-0#roadmap

I have heard this from a lot of people, yet here I am, using a terminal that supports this, and have yet to ever do it. Can you help me understand what workflows you depend on Ctrl+f for? I wonder if I am missing something big.

You can map something like cmd+shift+f to open the entire buffer in your default text editor, this has been sufficient for a lot of folks - myself included - while we wait for native scrollback search to land.

Can someone explain why this was not one of the first features added? Who doesn't want to search their history? There must be some complication.

Mitchell raised the issue himself two years ago: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189

> i desperately want to use ghostty

Is there any particular reason?

He has the skills and the time to make the best possible software and he's doin it for free Respect for that.

The nerds would do sooo much better for ourselves if we could build a momentum behind comments like this.

Finding mechanistic (& programmatic) sympathy counts for so so much! Shapes the arch of software so much! But it's such invisible unknown work to most people, not so overtly clear & obvious but something that constantly builds day after day, person after person, incremental 0.2% gains compounded by lack of friction.

As well as just promoting good practioners, it feels like discourse about software architecture has really fallen off. We are deep inside rabbit holes specific to this framework or that, and there's only occasional popping out to free air to bring back some observations from the burrows. Ideally we'd have many more volumes of Architecture of Open Source Applications (2011), for example, to really dive into what is, to give us some common referents to learn from and talk about. https://aosabook.org/en/

This is all so core, so worth getting deep on & looking how things are assembled, what the interfaces and modules and shapes look like, what the tradeoffs were. But it remains chiefly an arcane art, one that most developers much less most businesses haven't developed a refinement or taste for.

I had tried it briefly previously but in the last couple months I think I have made the permanent switch from iterm2. It's so much snappier and simpler and also reliably handles text reflowing when a long line wraps, which was a constant problem I had in iterm2, where it would insert fake newlines when copying out text that was wrapped.

I also like that I can have my config in a little plaintext file and just drop it onto a new computer and get the same keybindings. I am using the terminator keybindings for creating and navigating between split panes.

Since go 1.25 you can declare the what is the “root” of a go module, which is a good thing. Not everyone wants the top level directory filled with go files specially in a multi language repo. So this idea that /src is not good go directory will soon be outdated.

(Surely this issue must've been discussed/debated elsewhere ad nauseum because it seems an odd design decision to leave out such a common macos binding...)

But having only used ghostty as-is and getting bamboozled by the copy paste situation, this is game changing. I was just going to wait till preferences had a GUI/TUI.. So thanks!

Best news I've heard all day.

It’s weird to me that they consider GTK a “native” implementation — GTK is a whole [opinionated] layer of abstraction on top of the native interfaces.

It’s native in the sense that it’s not Electron, or Java, but it’s still a layer of abstraction which introduces all sorts of quirks.

Interesting, are there issues on the tracker pertinent to those problems?

I want to like it too. I even joined the Discord I was so excited about it. Unfortunately even at version 1.2.0, which I understand is a total rewrite on Linux, it's only usable for minutes before this bug kicks in https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/2210

I love ghostty. The only thing that is missing is a find feature which is such an odd omissions for an incredible piece of software.

What we are missing is a sponsorship model that is able to fun this kind of thing. It's not infeasible - look at university grants dispersement as an example of the overwrought predecessor of this. A ton of money moves through such institutions, and funds a lot of interesting projects.

One thing I've been envisioning is something like a "certified B corporation" style qualification that companies can get that indicates they contribute financially back to open source commensurate to the amount of it they consume to run their core business. If everything you do runs through open source software, in a moral sense, one can make the argument that you owe something back to it.

Wrong person. You're thinking of Michael “Monty” Widenius, not Mitchell Hashimoto

This can't be right. How are they still afloat?

Actually, that's the question (or rather the feeling) I had even before seeing these numbers. Just by reading the docs and looking at everything they built (and how they built it) made me wonder if they spend more than they make. That's a really funny feeling I never had before. Like, surely economies can't be that forgiving when it comes to polishing things. Is that what's happening to the company? Mere overspending?

Great question. For me it feels faster (anecdotally) and certain TUI components don’t break. It also is probably my bias of loving his work as well as everyone at work using it. Hive mentality I suppose.

Haha, thanks again :)

I've been delaying a major migration to NeoVim on [modern-terminal-I-can-never-decide-which] for years. Wezterm, Ghostty, iTerm2. None is exactly perfect, so I just keep watching them develop.

Is there a blog post anywhere that explains why it has taken so long to get search working? Ghostty is such a nice app but that's such a fundamental feature that there has to be a good reason... It's the only thing keeping me on iTerm2.

I was also downvoted for mentioning a few other minor things it is missing as well. While I'm holding out, it's getting there however.

6 months. 1.3 does not release until March 2026.

> No ⌘. sending CTRL-C

Wait wait wait, this is a shortcut in Mac??

Can you tell my why I should consider ghostty? (as a daily Terminal.app user)

Other huge projects are Clickhouse and Bun.

Do you consider yourself a neovim terminal power user?

I tried a while back to invert my workflow (from tmux driving neovim to neovim driving terminals) because I thought it might be easier to only ever have one buffer open for a given file, instead of attempting to open a file in a given pane only to realize that it's already open in a different neovim instance in a different pane.

When I was testing that stuff out I don't think I noticed particular issues with text reflow that would benefit from being solved by swapping to libghostty, rather my pain points were just about how to adjust to the different paradigm. I'd be curious to hear more about someone who is all in on Neovim embedded terminals (and possibly how libghostty might make it better).

I've been meaning to build something with this[1], maybe you'll use it before I get to it.

[1]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Why is not depending on a libc a good thing? Aren't they then rolling their own syscall wrappers?

I find the search through a file actually makes sense.

If you don't know, you can send the log to a file, and open that file to look through it. More powerful than just a search next, as you can have instance counts, search with regexp and all the bells and whistles and it virtually stops the logging.

At first I thought the same as you, now I've become quite partial to this concept. I hope they don't remove this.

I honestly didn’t even realize it was missing until I was reading this thread, cause I’m always in a zellij session which has a “search in default editor” key.

Pop the whole scrollback in helix, where I can search, select, jump around, paste stuff into a scratch buffer. It’s slick. It’s got a normal search too. But yeah I haven’t used a built in emulator search in a while I guess!

There's a few things like this but I'll give a pass because how new it is. Were this a mature project I'd be upset at incompetence, but given how young it is I think it's too early to be harsh.

Plus, they're very open about what they're doing and prioritizing. As another commenter said, it's coming soon. For the rest, open feature requests, you might have needs that others didn't think of or even realize they needed

Having recently come out of grad school, tell me about it...

But the same general problem exists in industry. Our fear of doing things non-optimally only results in a less optimal solution. It's a risky move to take no risks.

In both academia and industry you see the same people doing the same things in the same way. It's no wonder things don't change. You can't have a paradigm shift by following the paradigm (playing it safe). I feel like this is a big shame in both tech and academia as the histories of these have always been made by those who rocked the boat. At some point we just have to admit we're not very good at predicting the future and instead of trying to predict what will be the most successful we should fund passion. I'm sure charlatans will get funded too, but its not like we're doing a good job at preventing that from happening now anyways...

My experience is similar. Stuff doesn't break and it feels extremely snappy. I've switched to Zed for the same reason. I came to realize that I work much better with faster, simpler software, even if it's missing some nice-to-haves. It feels like you're closer to the problem you're trying to solve.

Same here. Mentioned 3 different bugs that happened to me recently, but it looks like it's deemed uncalled for or something.

Maybe sooner in the nightly builds then :)

To add... The missing scrollbars feel painful to me. I don't even want them for scrolling, really. I want the visual reference for:

"How much content is in this window"

and

"Where am I in that content"

I still use it daily but it means I have to switch tools for certain things, and reading log files or log output is one of the more common reasons I switch.

I should probably look into trying to get the scrollback info into my statusline, No idea how easy or hard that is - so if someone has done it, feel free to shoot me pointers.

In the latest version Shift + ctrl + alt + j copies the entire screen and opens it in what I assume is $EDITOR (maybe this can be configured). Or just shift + ctrl + j to copy the screen to temp file and pate the path. Either way, it then just becomes configuring it to use a pager by default, or `shift+ctrl+j` and then | less. This is similar to how kitty does search, by essentially outsourcing it to an external pager. I was put off by it at first, but it's very much in the UNIX philosophy.

They'll be working on it soon: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964826929326153898

I think op is telling a similar story, not necessarily the same person.

They’re owned by IBM

I recently migrated from vim to neovim and you can just migrate everything. I forgot where I found this but put this in ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

  " Load vim configs

set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after let &packpath = &runtimepath source ~/.vimrc

Then in my zshrc (well... I organize differently) I have the function

  function _exists() {
    command -v "$1" &> /dev/null
  }

  alias_vim() {
    if (_exists nvim)
    then
        alias vi='nvim'
        alias vim='nvim'
    elif (_exists vim)
    then
        alias vi='vim'
    fi
  }

Try Cmd-Shift-J. It dumps your buffer to a temp file, with the file path made ready for you. I do that and then open the temp file with vi.

Does nobody use grep?

Same here, scroll bars are literally the one missing feature keeping me from making Ghostty my daily driver. But the release notes roadmap mentions they will add them for 1.3. Waiting with anticipation.

Kitty at least let's you control the program used, and even set up different bindings for different programs.

1.3 is slated for release in March 2026.

You are correct. I tried to rewrite my statement after I was being downvoted. English is not my first language to the surprise of most.

More like IBM saved them.

That's the workaround I've used. I still want to be able to just press command F and see "error" highlighted throughout the scrollback.

"Do you not have phones?"

Suggestion to use Klogg (https://github.com/variar/klogg) for reading log files.

I always was on the camp of "tail -f file.log" but since discovering this app, I saw the light.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your request but do you not pipe outputs into a pager? (Less, more, batcat, etc) I feel like I'm probably not understanding the context though.

FWIW, zsh has a commands hash to make stuff like this potentially easier and cleaner. The following isn't quite how I'd do it, but is functionally equivalent.

    (( $+commands[vim] )) && alias vi=vim
    (( $+commands[nvim] )) && alias vi{,m}=nvim

How can you use grep to search the scrollback/screen buffer?

What good is grep if you want to search the build log on your screen that took an hour in the making? Should have thought of tee-ing it, well duh.

If mruby can make static ruby then that is actually kinda great, I didn't knew that.

I was thinking more of in terms of performance for some similar developer experience

Pardon me but isn't crystal OOP? i feel like it was because I was introduced to crystal lang via some youtuber some long time ago and the comments said that they didn't use because it was OOP

Also if mruby is so great (which it sounds here), then surely most ruby contributers can migrate over to mruby if that has these gains. I think mruby compiles to C as the intermediate right? So there are definitely some limitations as compared to being a interpreted langauge but that can be somewhat mitigated, no?

I am not a ruby expert or a crystal expert. Because If I was, I would be telling you your future (a slight pun ofc of being a future teller but yes I don't know much about it except the puts syntax or that 100 seconds video from fireship which gives me 10 year experience in ruby :p )

Or lnav (https://lnav.org/).

Centralized logging, a la Splunk is the gold (with what they charge, probably platinum) standard here. Watching someone who knows what they're doing at a Splunk console for a distributed system they understand is a thing of beauty. It's just a shame they charge so much.

I wasn't aware of +commands, thanks. Though I'm not sure this is easier and you can translate mine to bash trivially

Yours isn't technically equivalent though it is functionally. If we have both vim and nvim then we'll alias vi twice.

Also, your program provides less clarity. It saves lines but at a large cost to readability. I tend to share my dotfiles with newbies a lot so readability is very meaningful.

I wrap mine up in functions too because at the end of my alias file I can add something like this

  # aliases.zsh
  main() {
    alias_ls || echo "ls aliasing failed"
    alias_vim || echo "vim aliasing vailed"
  }

  main

It's a bit overkill and I never expect a simple alias like that to fail but there are three distinct advantages I get for being just a tad more verbose:

1) I have more complicated versions to deal with things like fd and batcat which have different names different operating systems (`fd` vs `fd-find` / `bat` vs `batcat`) and some additional configurations.

2) I can disable the alias by commenting out one line

3) knowing exactly where the alias is being loaded and thus what aliases are loaded.

Bonus) fails loudly but continues (it's an alias, I don't want you fail fail)

A few extra keystrokes are worth this advantage imo. Especially since I'm using vim so it's actually not any additional typing lol

It's style, so the choice is up to you and they'll accomplish the same things, but I'm just explaining why I use this design pattern. I've only given a stripped down snippet of code so I hope this context helps explain the larger pictures and how it can be used for larger needs.

I don't want to presume your use case, but Ghostty has a command for dumping the buffer to a file, which I use for processing output "too late" to use grep.

keybind = ctrl+alt+shift+o=write_scrollback_file:open

Ghostty has a write_scrollback_file action you can use to write the scrollback to a temporary file. I have this set to cmd+shift+f, so I simply

less [cmd+shift+f] [enter]

You can use grep similarly.

Sometimes you just have a command write output.

Try a pager instead. Batcat is more feature rich but there's always the good old less (and more) command. Both work great with grep. I do things like the following multiple times a day

  $ cat foo.log | less
  $ cat foo.log | $PAGER
  $ cat foo.log | grep 09-23-2025 | less

Side note / pro tip: on a new line in the terminal press control-x control-e. If you're in zsh you need to edit your config but this will work out of the box for bash.

You just rawdog that to stdout without a log file?

In that case are scroll bars even helpful for determining position?

My terminal history is normally huge, and the log output would be some unknown percentage of the total scrollable history.

I do. Setting up log files for each and every command seems tedious. I would rather just cmd+f to search and have it work for everything, as it is a property of the terminal, rather than a specific command.

Of course. Why not? I can use the terminal's search facility to search its infinite scrollback buffer.

If I don't anticipate problems, or things are slower than I thought? Sure

I'm still not quite sure what you mean. You can still {|,>} output from a program, so less and grep still help.

Or do you mean when you inevitably forget? Well then yeah you're at the mercy of your terminal but as others mentioned ghostty has a hack to help as well as some other terminals. But this should also help reinforce why you should pipe more often and write to files (or tee). It sucks but not making the same mistakes in the future and learning better habits will help you write better code and use better practices.

But that's the age old problem of "you can't analyze the data you didn't record" and that's a footgun you'll experience in every programming language, every experiment, and across many parts of life. Better to record and throw it away than not record and regret it.

You can leave the cat at home.

  less foo.log
  grep 09-25-2025 foo.log | less

Hmm I found the opposite to be true. Maintaining a well structured project is a much harder skill then starting green field.

but he will feel lonely if he doesn't participate :(

> "you can't analyze the data you didn't record"

It IS recorded. It's right there in scrollback (Literally the default buffer to record). It's easily accessible with most tooling, including nice scrolling, mouse support, find/search, etc...

Except in Ghostty, it's not so accessible. No find, no scrollbars.

I end up having to dump it into another tool, which at least they make pretty easy (ex: https://ghostty.org/docs/config/keybind/reference#write_scro...).

Although deciding when to do that would be easier if I had a better indicator for just how much scrollback content exists. Ex - if it's 3 pages... I'll just scroll through it. If it's 3000 pages... time to dump to file.

So no - by default I use a pager... just about never. Why would I when I have absolutely everything in scrollback by default 99.9% of the time?

---

Don't confuse your preferences with "correct" :P

I'm doing just fine with code and best practices, I'm simply stating that this is a rough edge on an otherwise lovely tool.

That is essentially the 2nd solution recommended. I think ghostty could do this itself as a hack. If the target binary is ssh (heuristic, but, ok), inject TERM=xterm-256color into env of the child process at launch.

I guess it isn't a huge deal to have every user to modify their ssh_config instead, but it's an ergonomic pain point for many new users.

  > Don't confuse your preferences with "correct" :P

Don't overlook the point by fixating on a technicality

  > I'm doing just fine with code and best practices

Yet, you aren't following best practices

  > So no - by default I use a pager... just about never. Why would I when I have absolutely everything in scrollback by default 99.9% of the time?

Fewer capabilities. But those were already explained and not just by me. There really should be no need for such huge scrollbacks, you have history

  > I'm simply stating that this is a rough edge on an otherwise lovely tool.

No one has disagreed with this point. I think everyone even agrees