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©(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.
A little bit more about the sponsor on HackerNews.
If you are a lazy bastard not wanting to click this, basically there a quite a few issues with the main goal of Hack Club (not the fiscal sponsorship sidequest), such as not using a privacy policy for kids for 11 years, many leaks of said data and misclassifying workers in at least 2024.
Someone explained to me once why a GPU-accelerated terminal emu might be useful, but I can’t recall what you might use that for. Anyone have an example of what a good use case would be?
Bias warning: I spend most of my workdays in the terminal, and I’m also a contributor to Ghostty.
The most noticeable difference is smoothness when you’re doing intensive terminal work like scrolling through large log files, running TUIs like btop/lazygit/yazi/lnav, or using multiplexers like tmux with multiple panes. Without GPU acceleration, you’ll see stuttering and lag with heavy output or complex interfaces.
It also makes a big difference in editors like Neovim, especially with syntax highlighting in large files or when scrolling quickly through code. The rendering just feels snappier and more responsive overall.
Basically, if you spend significant time in the terminal (like I do), the improved responsiveness is immediately noticeable. If you mostly use it for basic shell commands, the benefit is negligible.
Oh, thanks! I have lazyvim, btop, and Musikcube already, but I’ve never tried them in something like Ghostty or Alacritty. Might be worth trying!
Also, I’ll be looking into some of those programs you mentioned!
It’s just faster and smoother when scrolling text, and all the work of shifting those pixels is pushed off onto specialized hardware that’s much more efficient at it. I use alacritty which is a different GPU-accelerated terminal emulator and I’m very fond of it. It’s not a huge deal, I just figure that if I have the hardware, I might as well use it.
Oh, that makes sense. It also makes more sense why it’s called “Alacritty,” now.
How much VRAM does alacritty use? On my machine, nvidia-smi reports 6MiB for konsole, which I’m seems to be some default reserved by Qt apps (eg dolphin reports the same amount)
Most of my open terminals are using 9 MiB, although one is using 17.
My best guess is some local LLM AI bullshit running in terminal.
That’s a remarkably bad guess.
I guess this is an honest opinion
I switched to Kitty because I felt that the increased speed produced a perceived improvement in my workflow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29528343
There’s probably no big reason. It’s just that text is printed much faster. There’s no huge gain, especially for general usage and most use cases. But why not? Why shouldn’t you use the gpu if you have one?
If gpu would’ve been first, you’d wonder why you should use cpu if it’s slower. Faster is always(?) better and I as a user don’t really care if it is wayland or x11, why should I care about gpu or cpu? It just sounds great, but under the hood, it’s just a marketing stunt.
It’s nice to have but I just don’t care. Like if earbuds last 6 or 8 hours. They charge within 5 or 10 minutes, why should I care? Or like losless audio. My headphones can’t play it, and more important I can’t hear a difference. It’s nice, I’ll take it, but I don’t care about it.
Can I ssh into a server and not lose all productivity yet? Last time I tried ghostty I had to setup separate configs for my servers because they didn’t recognize it :/
The terminfo issue was resolved in the v1.2.0 release.
SSH shell integration is disabled by default, but once you enable it in your config you’ll be good to go.
This is a terminfo issue. When you ssh into the server, run
export TERM=xterm. That will tell the server how to handle your activity
Why does a terminal emulator need GPU acceleration?
My dev env is in the terminal. It really does help speed it up to nearly ad fast as pure GUI.
Ok? So is mine. You maybe missed my comment about redirects? Why are people pushing so much to stdout that it is causing a slowdown?
Most apps print stuff in the same loop as everything else, so stuff like alacritty might help it a little bit. It’s not really that significant most of the time, however.
