Ghostty bets a fast native terminal wins; HN #1 launch, 60k stars, non-profit

Ghostty is a fast, cross-platform terminal emulator built by Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp. Its bet: developers would abandon slow emulators for one that combines GPU-accelerated rendering, a native look on every platform, and modern terminal features — and that the project could be sustained as public, non-commercial infrastructure rather than a startup looking for an exit.

Hashimoto started Ghostty in 2022 as a Zig and graphics experiment with no intention to release it. After leaving HashiCorp in 2023, he shared it publicly and ran a private Discord beta of about 5,000 users drawn from a 28,000-member server, which generated intense pre-launch hype. On December 26, 2024, Ghostty 1.0 shipped free under the MIT license on macOS and Linux and hit the top of Hacker News with 2,319 points and 681 comments.

The project kept compounding through 2025: Hashimoto spun out libghostty as an embeddable terminal library, and in December 2025 transferred Ghostty's IP to Hack Club's 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship so the project legally could not be sold or monetized against its users. In April 2026 he announced Ghostty was leaving GitHub after what he described as daily outages, a post that drew 3,521 points and 1,051 comments.

By 2026 the terminal is 'in use by millions of people and machines daily' and the repository has roughly 60,000 stars. In July 2026, Hashimoto and three co-founders launched Superlogical, a new company backed by Notable Capital, Amplify Partners, Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke and Aaron Levie, to build a persistent-session terminal multiplexer on top of libghostty — a commercial sequel to the deliberately non-commercial terminal.