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

Open-source, cross-platform terminal emulator with a Zig core rendered via Metal/OpenGL, native macOS and Linux apps, and the reusable libghostty library.

That developers would switch to a GPU-accelerated native terminal — and that building it as MIT open source, later non-profit, beats commercializing it.

Hashimoto started Ghostty in 2022 while still at HashiCorp, intending a few months of Zig and graphics experimentation with no release plan. After leaving HashiCorp in 2023 he began publicly sharing the project, ran a private beta to manage bandwidth around his newborn, and promised a December 2024 open-source 1.0.

Ghostty 1.0 landed December 26, 2024 and immediately topped Hacker News with 2,319 points and 681 comments. Through 2025 the team shipped regular releases and libghostty, an embeddable terminal library; in December 2025 Hashimoto transferred the project's IP to Hack Club's 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship so Ghostty could never be sold. In April 2026 he announced the project was leaving GitHub over repeated outages, drawing 3,521 points and 1,051 comments.

Still running as free open-source infrastructure under Hack Club, with roughly 60k GitHub stars and millions of daily users. In July 2026 Hashimoto and three co-founders launched a new company, Superlogical, backed by Notable Capital, Amplify Partners, Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke and Aaron Levie, to build a persistent-session terminal multiplexer on libghostty.

Hashimoto's reputation from Vagrant, Terraform and HashiCorp meant developers trusted a one-line pitch about a terminal, converting curiosity into a 28,000-person Discord before 1.0 shipped.

The private beta turned scarcity into hype: 5,000 invited users out of a large waitlist made Ghostty the terminal everyone was talking about, then 1.0's MIT license removed every barrier to trying it.

Architecture was the product bet: a Zig core with GPU rendering and native macOS/Linux shells attacked the speed-vs-features-vs-native tradeoff that iTerm and Terminal.app left open.

Going non-profit under Hack Club converted adoption into durable trust and guaranteed the project could never be rug-pulled, fitting a tool that embeds itself into daily developer workflows.

Boring infrastructure wins with trust, not revenue: a hype-driven beta, an MIT release, and a non-profit backstop made a terminal emulator the default for millions — credibility was the moat.

As of September 2026 Ghostty remains free open-source software under Hack Club's fiscal sponsorship, with roughly 60,000 GitHub stars and millions of daily users, and development continues on GUI releases and libghostty with Hashimoto as project lead. Separately, he co-founded Superlogical in July 2026 with ex-HashiCorp, Vercel, Poolside and Heroku engineers to build a persistent terminal-multiplexer product; it raised backing from Notable Capital and Amplify Partners plus angels Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke and Aaron Levie, with improvements flowing back into libghostty.