We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (Interview)

25:34And so do you want to be building in Windows support when you don't have to? So my, yeah, I think the important part of the ambition point is that it's not financial. The ambition behind Ghosty is really terminals are a really fundamental part of a software developer's life, no matter what sort of ecosystem you're in, whether it's web technologies, desktop, you know, etc. Whether you're a student or professional, basically all these dimensions, terminals are very important. And I don't see that going away. And I sort of think like, what if I don't feel like people have focused very hard on terminals.

26:11And can I sort of be that person for a while for the steward for a while, improve the ecosystem in some way, and sort of build a community that could then sort of carry that on later. But yeah, the real, I guess, like to put it into one word, the real goal with Ghosty is impact. And to that end, I think that Windows support's important. But more importantly, that's why libGhosty is more important to me because I don't want Ghosty to be the one and only terminal emulator application. I don't want to build an iOS application, an Android application, whatever future platforms exist. I want to enable others to do that without having to reinvent the core.

26:51And so LibGoC to me is like the actual impactful thing that's going to happen over the long term. And we could get into licensing later, but that's sort of part of the reason why we ended up on the MIT license as well as I really just wanted, whether you're going to be commercial or open source or whatever you wanted to do with LibGoC, I really just wanted to enable that impact no matter what. I'm just reminded of Daniel Stenberg with Curl. You know, libcurl is the reason why curl, not to curl the command line, but curl the thing is everywhere. It's because of libcurl more than it is because of the binary curl, although they're both used a lot.

27:27But I mean, huge impact with libcurl. So, yeah, it's a great example. I'm glad it doesn't have to be a business. I was worried. I was like, what is the, you know, do you want to build another HashiCorp here? But probably not with this. Yes. And I think it's to zoom out a little bit. I think it's kind of cool of you, I suppose, to, you know, some would say, well, you don't have to do anything, Mitchell. You can just go and fly as you do. Right. You don't have to satiate any of these technical chops you have or you want to play around in areas you've never had a chance to play around. You could just simply just go and do something else, but instead you're steeping yourself in an area where you really haven't had a chance to do so.

28:07And it will be impactful. I think the Wikipedia of the future for you will be so cool because you could have had just walk away, do your thing, family, whatever. And congratulations on the recent addition to your family, of course, but you don't have to do this. You want to do this. I think that's, to me, that's cool. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, I, you know, whatever people write on Wikipedia, if there is anybody, anything, then fine. But I think that, you know, part of the way I've described Ghosty is this idea of technical philanthropy. And, and one of the things I know about myself is, you know, like, I just love programming, and I love building.

28:46And I knew that wasn't going to stop no matter sort of how much career success I had or, or things like that. And so my thinking was, if I'm going to spend time on the computer programming anyway, is there a way to make that time meaningful? And, you know, I'm sure there's more directly meaningful ways that I could spend that time. But, you know, I felt that doing this broadly used category of software for free and trying to make it good, I guess, for a blunt term, just good, could be meaningful. And so that's that's yeah, it's definitely a part time thing. I don't spend 40 hours a week. I spend barely maybe 10 or 15 on this.

29:27And it's just the way I could have fun and pursue my passion, but still feel like I'm helping something.

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32:52who's the we behind ghosty i know that you are the obviously the inceptor of it but who else there's a community how have you uh leveled up who's involved roles responsibilities i have to say i didn't get or somehow miss the email that you invited me personally and jared i'm sure too into this beta i went into the discord like any other community member you did i did i got you in there dude i gave him your handle well i had to i had to prove to tragic that i was me and that i wasn't just somebody saying hey i'm at a podcast with mitchell in like 30 minutes can you please give me the yeah like gosh i haven't installed this thing yet i should play with it and uh i was like i i just gapped getting that invite somehow because my github is connected to my personal email not changelogs email for some reason and i don't check that as frequently as i do business stuff so i really should change that but anyways so there is a discord there's people in there that aren't Mitchell.

33:47They're doing things. Yeah, the Discord is, I don't know what it is now, but it's somewhere between 20 and 30 ,000 people. And that's way too many people. And so there's been a good volunteer community of moderators that work really hard because it's also somewhat of a chaotic experience having 30 ,000 people in one text channel. And so they work really hard and do a great job and not just contribute on that. A couple of the moderators maintain the Discord bot that is used for a variety of things. In addition to that, there's been a couple hundred code contributors to go see already. And the thing that stood out to me the most about that was I went back and listened to our 2012 Vagrant changelog episode a week ago.

34:32Since I was like, I wonder what I was doing back then. That really threw me back. And the first thing I noticed is we were talking about how Vagrant passed something like some number of stars. But I remember it had just passed something like 100 contributors. And it was already two years old and pretty popular by the time we were talking. And we were talking about how I was so amazed by that. And I was thinking, wow, the software developer ecosystem has gotten so much bigger. Obviously, due to some of my background, it attracts more people. But GoSee and private beta has more stars and almost double the contributors that Vagrant had after two years of being a public project.

35:08And so that was kind of like a mind-blowing thing. But that's, yeah, it's sort of built. The we is really the community in terms of people that are working, I guess, like even multiple hours a week on this. It's probably just me. But yeah. Just to close the loop, I have to share the levels of which I had to ensure, tragic, that I was me. Driver's license? This is a DM in Discord. Hey, there's a funny detail to that, I think, is that I thought for sure when I started working on a terminal more seriously, that very few people, first of all, would care. But of those very few that cared, I thought that demographically it would skew to a more mature audience.

35:50But what I've discovered is that a lot more people care about terminal aspect. And predominantly of those people, it is young people. When I say young people, I literally mean teenagers in school, a lot of teenagers in school up to early 20s, early career type people. And because of that, there's some shenanigans, I will say, within the Discord. And so the moderators are very sensitive. There's been a lot of scams, a lot of phishing, a lot of stuff, people just trying to get into the beta. And it's not that important, but, you know, I think when you're younger, you're a little more zealous about these things.

36:30And so, and so the moderators, I think, are very hardened to when someone comes and says, oh, I know Mitchell, I need the beta, that they're very suspicious. So, yeah. Yeah, I was like, I'm about to pod with Mitchell. Can somebody help me get in the beta, please? And so I ended up in DM with Tragic and he says, hey, can I get some kind of confirmation here that you're not impersonating anyone? Felt random if we're actually about to talk to Mitchell, LOL. and so I was like okay I opened up the calendar app and screenshotted the calendar invite on my calendar that says we're about to talk and he's like hmm not good enough basically I mean he did the thinking emoji and he's like just to be 100 % sure can you follow me on github for like 20 seconds and then unfollow me sorry for being excessive and so I followed tragic for and I'm still following him I'll just go ahead and leave it that's hilarious so I had to go through a couple hoops it's a real insiders club the hoops will all disappear soon once i got into github it said you had the invite there so i was like once i was actually there's like hey by the way github is telling me this mitchell invited you last week you you're an idiot like you don't have to do all this there you go i'm surprised you didn't get banned honestly like usually those types of things pop up and they're sort of like because there's like 10 moderators or less i think there's like seven moderators and 25 000 people most of the time when stuff like that starts happening moderators are just like i don't have time for this and they just ban you from the server.

37:54Well, he didn't. They were very nice. Tragic was nice. And that's the loop closed. But the question to get to this point was really, who's behind Ghosty? I mean, obviously you started it. What's the plan for community? Do you have a governance model? Like how sophisticated and planned out have you gone with Ghosty? Not as much as I would like due to time constraints, but it's something I'll keep thinking about. So for the 1.0 public launch, it'll just really be me and the you know my side project it's really my project type thing a lot of community in terms of contribute contributions discord moderators love all those people and but i think that like longer term i am interested in some sort of governance model because i don't think i'm going to be working on a terminal the rest of my life so and i do want this to be impactful so that's something i've definitely thought about um the beta testers have been involved in this discussion we've had for almost a year based on project sustainability.

38:53Because even though it's not something I want to pursue any financial gain for, I would like it to be sustainable for others. And so we've talked about, can we set up whether it's, is it sponsorships? Is it this? Is it that? In order to, I don't want any of that, but in order to pay the infrastructure costs and also potentially in the future pay contributors as well. And so that's something that we're just talking about and we're not 100 % sure about. But that's sort of the extent to which I've been thinking about this so far. Makes sense. I mean, so no BDFL, temporarily BDFL. Yeah, I mean, yeah, for now, it is definitely a BDFL model for now.

39:32But yeah, BDFL for now. Gotcha. BDFL-FN. There you go. How long am I working on it? Uh, so the first commit was actually March or April, 2022, but it's very deceiving because I was still full-time working for HashiCorp and you could just tell through the commit history. I worked on it here and there, there was like a three month period where I didn't do a single thing. And then, you know, it was very, very on and off because it was really just me playing around with technologies. I think I got a little bit more serious, um, probably last about over a year, a little over a year ago. Um, yeah. Did you ever consider post-Hashi like, you know, farming or something?

40:10This is a cliche, but just not doing software for a while, trying something completely different. I mean, I know we know you fly planes, but that's more of a hobby, right? I do fly planes. I do. Yeah. That is a hobby. Um, but it's, uh, I didn't get all pessimistic. Like a lot of people get, I still love technology and I think that technology is getting better. And I think that there's a lot that could be done with it still. So I knew that I was going to stick around and do something. The important thing I did post HashiCorp was when I really formally really left, like wasn't getting any sort of paycheck or anything and had to get healthcare on my own and all that sort of stuff.

40:44When I really left, my daughter was about two and a half months old. And so one thing I really wanted to do was just be able to spend a ton of time with her. So for the majority of this year, and that's a big part of why I didn't publicly release Ghosty right away. For the majority of this year, I've been home and only working during naps or at night or whatever. Every time my daughter's been awake, I've been with her. And it's only been within the past month or so where that started to change a little bit as she's about 15 months now. She has more things that she's going to and stuff. And so I've been able to carve out more like dedicated, even though she's awake, like working hours.

41:23And so I think I did spend that time. But on the other side, you know, I, I'm not someone that can't work. I love working and my family knows I love working. And so finding that time, um, showing being able to, as my daughter gets older to like see her dad working, you know, that's important to me. And so, uh, that's, that's all part of it. What are you doing, dad? Just writing some software over here. She's got a, I know there's no video element to this, but I have all these stickers, like ghost stickers. They're not finalized yet, but I just have so many of these things. And, And she's at the age where she loves stickers.

42:01So I'll show for you. You can see all these stickers. There's about a dozen. There's so many. And she has all of them. And there's ghost stickers all over her house. And my wife jokes that she points at it and goes, oh, that's daddy's work. Because for now, it is daddy's work. And so that's what it is. That's cool, man. I love that you, I mean, to be in a position to take that time. You know? Right. I think even if I was in your position because my brain can't let something go, like even if I don't need to financially gain from it, my brain won't let go of the problem set. So I would find that kind of challenging, not so much to not give my necessary time to my child that's newly born, but more so my brain.

42:44The separation of that you can't help that. You can't help how your brain works if you can't let a problem go necessarily. That would be my fear for me. Like if I was in your position to be like, you know what, I can't stop my brain from thinking about a problem set. Oh, yeah. I mean, even when I wasn't really when even when I was just doing go see, like literally at night after the baby slept, I was actually doing it. I require a lot less sleep than my wife. And so I've always been like a six hour a night kind of guy. And so I was actually when she was an infant and waking up in the middle of night, I was just not going to sleep before she woke up that first time.

43:21I was like, I will just work and then I will handle the baby and feed her the bottle and put her back to sleep. And then I'll go to bed after that. And so that was like sometimes, you know, like midnight or something. And I would sometimes run into my wife when she was awake. I'd run over to her and have my phone out. And I'd be like, look at this, look at this. And she's like, oh, do you have a cute video of our daughter? And, you know, I'd show her the video and it would be like font rendering. And she was so disappointed. I think if there was a nerd snipe bingo card, like if we're playing bingo for like how you would nerd snipe somebody and you had like, you know, prolific open source maintainer who builds unicorn business and retires and then comes back to reinvent a terminal and then chooses Zig as a programming language.

44:13Like, those are all things where it's like, I know why there's 25 ,000 people in that discord. Like you have all of the different ingredients, which is really awesome. And that's just a way of setting up a question about Zig. Like, why did you go that route? Because that's a, yeah, that's an interesting choice, interesting language and a burgeoning one. Yeah, you, you could, uh, I, I, you could find a tweet I did, I think end of 2021, very early 2022, where I talked about how I was interested in Zig, but I had no time to, to use it. and it was always in the back of my mind of this interesting programming language and I think it's an important background to me I was a professional paid C programmer for a year or two of my life, somewhere between a year and two years of my life and I like low level system stuff I actually like C and so I wanted to, HashiCorp was very close to getting all software written in C by the way, that's very it was very close, it was between C and Go and go one, but it was very close to C.

45:13And I wanted to get back to systems programming, but I recognized the warts that C had and I was looking for a better C. And Zig to me always felt like that. And years into using Zig, I feel the exact same way. I feel better about it. I love, it brings me joy every day to write Zig. And so that's really it. Later on, I learned about the community. I like the community, the sort of the founder of the Zig programming language, Andrew, really we've now hung out in person multiple times really awesome like kind person and his technical points of view are fantastic and and so everything sort of came together where i'm just having a lot of fun yeah that's sort of how it how it goes did you try go did you try rust did you go straight to zig or did you start writing it and see at first and then switch to zig how did it play out i knew go wouldn't be a choice because my i knew i wanted to do something that really i I owned every single allocation and every single instruction that would ever be run.

46:11And having an active runtime that was running was never going to be, and a garbage collector was never going to be an option. The real plausible option there was Rust. And I didn't try it with the terminal because by then I had already had enough experience with Rust that I knew I didn't want to write Rust every day. You know, the way I describe it is I philosophically and as a technical achievement, I have absolutely nothing but respect and I'm impressed by Rust. I think it's very impressive. But as a personal basis, it's very superficial. I just, when I write and read Rust, I'm not having fun.

46:45And I want to have fun. And part of the joy is writing the code. And, you know, it's very much a stylistic choice. I hate to put it in that perspective because I think engineers want some sort of concrete, objective reason of why one versus another is better. it's really a vanilla versus strawberry ice cream flavor sort of thing for me it's they're both great they both are edible you know but i choose one over the other and um that's that's really what it came down to for me has any of your work affected zig like upstream as it built fixed bugs new new features requests i know you did some you know you've done some donations to the foundation So you're helping out in that way.

47:29But like, is there a symbiosis here? I think so. I think so. And I think Andrew and people on the project would say the same thing. So, I mean, very directly before the project, I literally contributed to the compiler. So there's that very direct personal relationship. But with the project, I mean, Zigg's still such a new burgeoning language that there aren't very many real world users. And I think having this real world use case exposed a lot of not just bugs, but ergonomic improvements and issues. One of the things that I think a very big thing, a couple of very big things that popped up really immediately was the need for package management.

48:07And then beyond that, which is now sort of solved and within Zig, and beyond that, the need to enable system packagers, which are separate. Like, you know, one of the things I'm doing with Ghosty is I'm not doing any of the packaging. I'm going to release the source. I'm going to do the Mac app because that's kind of, you need to like kind of pay and sign in, blah, blah, blah. but all the Linux stuff, if you want an Ubuntu apt package or RPM or Nix package, I'm not doing any of that. And that's pretty classic, right? Like open source, like packagers or other people. But Zig is such a new thing that I knew that would be challenging for those people.

48:41And so Andrew did a really great job of listening to my feedback, but other real world projects and building in the system packaging mode and guidelines into Zig, where I feel pretty good about when we go public, that we're going to be in a place where hopefully Ghosty pops into Debian repos and stuff pretty quickly. But that's, I think, a good example of how things go. And then just compiler stability. I mean, the ZIG compiler moves super fast. And I'll regularly just say, Ghosty doesn't compile anymore. Not because you made a breaking change, but because something's actually broken. And I believe they use Ghosty here and there as sort of a canary of whether the compiler is stable.

49:20Can Ghosty build and run? if Ghosty can build and run, then that's a pretty good, it's a pretty good sort of like big integration test, right? For the whole compiler. Have there been any features that you've built or parts of Ghosty, whether it's because of Zig or because of some of the reason where it's like, this should be straightforward. And then it was just a minefield of trouble or any particularly hairy technical problems you've had to solve. I have to laugh at that because the joke I always make about my work on Ghosty is that But what I really ended up building, 70 % of my time, I'm just building font rendering.

49:54And the other 30 % of my time is a terminal emulator. So I think that the really big hairy thing is really font rendering. It is a minefield. And when I say font rendering, I don't mean just reading a font file and drawing a glyph. I mean everything from Unicode handling, emoji, skin tone emoji, East Asian languages, and then drawing them as well. I mean, that whole path is a crazy mess. And even just today, just total coincidence today, I tweeted about a bug I found with skin tone emoji. And that's just a coincidence, but my life has been dominated by font rendering. But luckily, I found a lot of joy when I get it fixed, but I've been shocked by how much time I spend thinking about it.

50:41And it's not in the past. You're still working on it, right? Because you just found a bug today. I thought it was in the past. I always think it's in the past and here we are. You think it's done and then there's another bug. But today, it's done today. We're good. Now it's in the past. For today at least, yeah. What, I mean, what in particular is so stinking hairy about it? Like because different environments render out differently or what makes it so fraught? There's a lot of layers and it is to some artistic, right? The way fonts look and stuff. And there's not a pixel perfect specification that says that given this font and these characters, whatever, this is how it looks.

51:22It really is mathematical with a lot of wiggle room in terms of how much anti-aliasing you use, the spacing, where it floats on the line. There's a lot of wiggle room. And so I think in addition to sort of the core technical challenges of so many different phases of fonts, there's also like people that just come up and say, it doesn't look good. Nothing's wrong. I just don't like the way it looks. And then you have to like, you kind of have to dig into why that is. And Ghosty provides a ton of knobs for those people to get fonts looking the way you want. and then our gold standard has basically been we want our fonts to look like Mac default.

52:02So like text edit, honestly, is our gold standard. The way text looks in text edit is the way it's going to look in Ghosty by default. So yeah, that's been that. But I think also just finding all the layers I never thought about. So like I think the first one that shocked me that I had never considered as an engineer was how do you pick a default font? You have a monospace application. In a web browser, you say font family monospace and the web browser picks it for you. Like a fallback. Yeah, that doesn't exist at the OS level, right? You have a list. It doesn't. No, you have a list of fonts. They have different properties.

52:38Some are monospace and not. That's an easy one to just break down. But within the monospace, now you have a bunch of different ones. And like, how do you choose which one you want to use? And it has to be deterministic because if they launch their terminal every time and you choose a different monospace font, it's going to be a problem. And so, yeah, it doesn't exist. And so that was the first thing where I was like, why am I thinking about this? Because yeah, it feels like something the OS should do for me. And so that was sort of the first challenge. And then... What does Turnolite app do? I don't know how they do it, but they tend to use...

53:09I think they probably hard code it. Menlo. Menlo, yeah. Is it Menlo? Yeah. I think they just use the Apple usual one. And so Apple's kind of easy because Apple does... They solve some of that problem. They have those... even in the web they have some specific os sans and monof face yeah and you could always apple's easy because there's so much homogeneity across the platforms right you could kind of just say i'm going to do whatever apple does linux is the really hard one okay so what do you do basically um i look for obviously monospace font that's an easy one and then i look for one that has ASCII characters.

53:50And then I look for one that has more ASCII characters than anyone else. And then, you know, I sort of just apply the scoring algorithm to it. If it has emoji within it, it's even better because it's likely the font designer made them work together. So I, I tend to score things with more glyphs in it higher, uh, if it has more faces. So if it has italic and bold as well, then it gets scored higher than something that only has a regular. So yeah, you just apply all this scoring to it and hope for the best. And so far, the beta community has felt pretty good about it. Did you consider just getting opinionated and just packaging your favorite one and saying like, this is Ghosty's default is this?

54:30I do. I do actually. I do as well. I do as well. So if I don't find basically a font that I'm satisfied with, then we fall back to using the packaged font, which is JetBrains Mono with nerd fonts already applied. Great choice. Thank you. Thank you. It's all of the defaults of Ghosty for the most part are the ones that I would use. And so, yeah, but yeah, so we do that as well, because there are, in particular, a really problematic area of Linux is there's a lot of installations of Linux that don't have emojis, for example. And so we package an emoji font so that emojis just work out of the box.

55:04Again, these are things that don't happen on closed Apple computers, but on Linux, we have to think quite a lot about. Yeah. I ran into that because we have this little node server that basically fires up Chromium and loads some stuff into a browser and then things screenshots it. And we want to use emoji in there because it's like, you know, promotions for our shows and stuff. And I developed the whole thing here on my Mac and everything was great. And I deployed it to fly and it's just using Ubuntu that just doesn't have emoji. And so it's like falling back to some weird Unicode thing. I have to actually like install an emoji font pack in the Docker file or whatever, just to get to actually have an emoji in that remote Chromium browser.

55:45Pay in the butt, man. Linux, pay in the butt. Yeah. I mean, and stylistically, the sort of unburdened licensed emoji fonts, I don't personally love. Like, I don't think they look that good. Yeah, same. So I wish that Apple would license their Apple emoji so that it could be used cross platform. but you can't, like legally you can't. There's people online obviously who have pulled it out. You can find them, yes. Yeah, so you could find it. But as a distributor of software, I cannot. Can't do that, no. Totally. It's a UI-monospace is what you do in the cascade of the CSS font stack. One of my favorite things I tell people when they ask more and more about fonts is the best source of figuring out how to do anything is web browsers.

56:32Every, every independently, every person I've run into that's done a lot of text work has landed on, oh, yeah, I read Firefox and Chromium source code and blink and like all these different things. Like, and that is true of Ghosty as well. Like whenever anyone has been like, I want to support this feature. And I think, how do you make that work? You find the answer because web browsers have solved it and they've they're cross platform and things like that. Yeah. Not bad ideas, too. to have a default you know string essentially you can set that says give me the OS's native version of the monospace font give me that right yeah nice so what I've experienced from Ghosty is A.

57:16Tmux works B. No sign in and C config so this is where most people go right it's like okay how do I configure this thing so if 70 % of your time is font rendering my guess is like the other 30 % is mostly configuration because holy cow there's a whole bunch of configuration things everything you could possibly imagine and there's not really and maybe this will change between where we are which is private beta and 1.0 or maybe this is 1.1 i don't know but like there's no config built into the mac app it just opens up text edit on your you know dot your slash go see slash dot configure whatever it is the file thoughts on that i'm sure this is a huge part of your work is like configuration right Yeah, I mean, depending on the audience here, I mean, I think my thoughts on configuration are going to be loved or hated.

58:03I've created a good duopoly of people that either love like HCL with Terraform or think that I've crapped on the entire industry with this thing that people have to do every day. It's one or the other. And no further comment on that. But I think because of that, I think there's a lot of experience I have with configuration. Vagrant was Ruby. Packer has JSON and supported JSON and then now supports HCL and then Terraform is HCL. I sort of got done the spectrum. And so I was coming into this a little with some experience and opinion. And Ghosty's primary, so its configuration file is a custom text-based non-programming format.

58:46There's no conditionals. It's just key equals value straight down. People have described it as very any-like, but there's no categories like any. It's just key equals value. The principle why behind that, and I suspect I'm going to have to keep defending this over and over, but the principle why behind it is that the config file and the command line arguments are equivalent. So anything, any key equals value you could set in the file, you could do dash dash key equals value on the command line, and they perfectly match. So if you know how to do the CLI, you could do the config file and vice versa.

59:20And that's a very important property I want to keep. I think it's very educational friendly to a tool. And then the other reason is because I could parse it, validate it and load it in a single forward pass. So this was more of a performance thing, but I don't need to maintain an abstract syntax tree like you might have to with a YAML or something. I could have an array of bytes, conceptually an array of bytes, read one at a time. I only have to keep a small, you know, fixed size back buffer, move forward, and I could parse the config. And it is definitely a detail that's probably not super important.

59:54But because of that, Ghosty has the fastest config parser. And you have to read the config every time you start Ghosty. And so it's something that I didn't want to waste startup time on. And so that's a big reason why I chose that format as well. But yeah, I mean, I really haven't gotten any. From the people who have actually used Ghosty, I haven't gotten any pushback on it. It's hard to dislike. Like, I mean, the only thing you might want is like conditionals and things like that. And I just think philosophically, I tell those people you should be using Westerm or something that supports Lua.

1:00:23Like that's not something, I'm never gonna make initializing a runtime, loading files, evaluating code, part of the startup path of my terminal emulator. Like it's not gonna happen. So yeah. Does that have implications for plugins, extensions, et cetera? Like, is there plans for that? Does that exist? It has implications. Variations, I'm not sure exactly for what yet. I mean, I think the one that popped up first was people wanted a different theme for light versus dark mode. And so that was sort of the first conditional thing that popped up. We solved it in a different way. You can just specify a light and dark theme as separate config options, pretty straightforward.

1:01:04But there's other ones too. So I think the one that's looming right now that actually hits me is that I want different key bindings between macOS and Linux. I'm somebody that spends a pretty 50-50 time between macOS and Linux. And so I want the key bindings to be slightly different because there's no command character when I use Linux. And so there's workarounds for that that really aren't very ugly. We have the ability to load additional config files only if they exist and not error, basically only log if they don't exist. And so you could actually create macConfig, Linux config and have it not exist on that platform.

1:01:41And that solves that problem to some extent. But I do want to solve that in a less duct tapey way. And so there's implications. But I think that... My view generally on problems is that constraints are good. And so I think we've defined our constraints, which is that I want to forward pass single, you know, parsable thing. I want it to be fast. I want it to be isomorphic with the command line interface and config file. And I think those constraints are set in stone. And if you if you have some fundamental constraints, then then you could actually start a discussion of how you solve it. But I think that generally speaking about software in the industry that I see is too many people are choosing the most generic thing without constraint as the answer.

1:02:30Like, I'm just going to let you write arbitrary code to do this. Or I'm like, this is the do anything machine. It's like, I feel better about constraints. So that's just a philosophical tangent. yeah what about things that's as simple as and i'm gonna compare against warp for now because i use warp on the daily and cool i did sign in i was not happy about it you don't have to anymore but we joined warp back when you when you had to so yeah yeah it's too late it's like the we're fans of warp we're not haters of warp by any means i am i am as well i am so i that was one of our main points of advice with warp was like don't make a sign and i guess you don't anymore so yeah i didn't know that but i'm signed in and i'm me one thing i do like though is that whenever i and i'm on a mac so whenever i like type something out onto the terminal and if i want to like select it to erase it it's command shift and then the back arrow like i would in a text editor yes i do like those kind of features and then when i do that when i compare the same experience in ghosty i can't do that it starts typing like d's and stuff like that yeah yeah like different characters so i don't know if that's like a direct mapping or maybe it's it's not mature yet enough and it's on your plan your roadmap but those kind of things i think really make that first experience you know key that i can just treat the command line like a text editor that's what i hate about terminal app and other terms you gotta like do special things to make it like a text editor where you can jump around the text and do different things to be speedy.

1:04:05And now I'm hitting backspace and stuff like that. And this is not cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you're exactly right. I think what Warp did with that is very good. You know, I don't even know if Warp's open source or anything. I don't know how they did that specifically. I know I have ideas. I know how I would do it if I did it. But I don't know how they specifically did it. But that is something. So I guess there's two answers to that. One is it is on our roadmap to a certain extent in the sense that Mac, I assume you're on a Mac if you're more, Mac has a bunch of standard text. I think Apple calls them actions and they're named things like select previous paragraph, select next paragraph.

1:04:42They have like names. One of the open issues on GoSee right now is to implement those actions and just do them in some way. And I say, so then part two is in some way. The challenge is that the thing that's actually doing the text editing is the shell and not the terminal. And this gets into a layering thing that I think an everyday person doesn't care about. And I want them to not have to care about it. I'm just talking as an, I don't care about it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just talking as an implementer. I'm just saying why this, I'm being funny. No, it's all good. Most people don't care about it. But for me as an implementer, it's what makes my life hard because it's really not my problem that I could easily solve.

1:05:23Because what a terminal emulator does is you enter characters, we encode them as some events and we send them to the shell. We're actually not editing that prompt, right? The shell is editing the prompt and the shell is moving. When you hit back arrow, I'm not even moving the cursor. I'm sending a back arrow to the shell and the shell is sending a message back to me saying, move the cursor left by one, but it could do anything it wants. In the same way that when you hit the up arrow, it's not telling me to move the cursor up. It's telling me paint this text, which is history that I don't know anything about, the shell knows about.

1:05:52And so it's hard for me to solve because we don't own that text input. There's very hacky things that Ghosty and other terminals do. If you shift click somewhere into the prompt, the cursor moves there. I think it's shift clicked or shift command clicked. I don't even remember off the top of my head. And when someone suggested Ghosty support that, I gave them this answer of like, I can't do that. They said, oh, other terminals support it. And so I went and looked and I was like, how do these other terminals do it? they actually synthesize arrow keys is how they do it. They guess, they guess that you, you clicked one row up and four cells to the left.

1:06:27I'm going to send you one up arrow and four left arrows and hope your cursor gets there. And it leads to all sorts of weird stuff. So if you like, you could do this in ghosty, you could, you could do it in other terminals where if you click up too many times, history will start showing up because it's sending up arrows and history is actually showing up instead. And that that's a terrible experience. And so this is a long rambly way to say it's not my problem but i do want to solve it i do want to help make it easier and this is one of the areas where i want a terminal to provide better tooling to shells so that we could actually do this in a very user-friendly way it's a great reason to get warp to be open source because the user experience with using warp at the terminal level from a entry level and editing level of what's going into the prompt yep is bar none it's solid like i like It's fast on that front.

1:07:15It's fun to use. The community suggested this as an option, as a configuration option. I could solve it by separating out where the prompt is and where the output is. And I think that's what warp does. Your prompt input is like a totally separate box from where the output goes. And in that way, I could just defer sending stuff to the shell. I could actually own the input fully. And only when you sort of hit enter or hit tab or hit certain control characters, I could actually flush it out to the shell and be like, okay, what's the deal? And sync back up. it's not a I'm not trying to over trivialize that problem or anything it's it's I think what warp did is really good there but that's that's how I could solve it but it would feel distinctly different for people that actually want a prompt that starts you know marching down your screen yeah well here's what happened though is when I fired up ghosty for the first time and started playing with it this happened this scenario where I'm like trying to manipulate the text I'm going to enter into the prompt yeah and then I'm like okay now I know I know config is my next step because I got to make Dracula my theme.

1:08:11That's like the first thing I did. I'm like, okay, how do I theme this thing? And so when I Vim and then I put the path into the config file and I entered it or I edited it, then I saved it. It yelled at me and said it couldn't make the thing. I don't know why. So I had to like touch the file first and then go edit it, which is not normal for Vim because you can usually just Vim to a path and it creates itself. The directory maybe didn't exist? I think so. I have a config directory, but not a ghosty directory. So maybe it was the ghosty directory, not living. so I had to touch it first and then go in and edit with Vim.

1:08:40Right. Some of that, the new Mac OS stuff where it needs permission for all kinds of stuff like first time you run it. I don't think so. Okay. But then I try to, you know, manipulate the text and just try to like mess with it and I was like, well, now I have to add config and so I'm back in the documentation trying to think, well, I've got to add my own key mapping so I can have this jumping around and I imagine that somewhere in the docs I would find it but, you know, 20 minutes later we had this phone call so I didn't have enough. You didn't get there yet. I haven't gotten there yet to solve that problem.

1:09:07So here I am ranting. I think this is kind of crucial behavior, though. That's why it's such a simple thing. But I think everyone's going to have a version of my problem, right, when they first fired up. They're going to have some version of input manipulation that's very important. And it's part of your speed as a developer on the terminal is how you can manipulate what you put in. And that takes time where I have to rejigger my brain or add config, which I don't mind doing. It's just a matter of like not knowing what to do at the gate. Yeah, I completely agree. It's actually one of the last remaining discussion points before the 1.0 is some of these defaults that we want to set in that sense.

1:09:45Because the tradeoff between these defaults is that if we put those key bindings as defaults or those behaviors as defaults, then things like TUI programs can't map them because you're taking over them. And so do you want to actually, you know, like it's, we're talking about whether that's important or not, or if it's more important that by default, people expect, you know, what you just did. And I think it's also important, like, when I consider that it's where people are coming from, like, if you're coming from terminal app, or iterm or something, then this is likely to not really be an issue, because we behave almost identical to those.

1:10:18But if you're coming from like warp, then yeah, it's going to be a big issue. and so I'm not super sure I mean that discussion actually did lead to the the sort of I think extreme path which we're not going to go down because it's too complicated of inspecting their machine to be like are you a z shell user were you a warp is warp installed like should we behave more like warp on first startup like are we going to guess basically based on what you have and I'm not ready to go down that path yet we do it we do that for other things but I'm not ready to go down that path for things like input manipulation but um it's unfortunately complicated but i agree with you yeah i'm sure you do what's up friends i'm here in the breaks with david shu founder and ceo at retool if you didn't know retool is the fastest way to build internal software so david we're here to talk about Retool.

1:11:14I love Retool. You know that. I've been a fan of yours for years. But I'm on the outside and you're clearly on the inside, right? You're on the inside, right? I think so. Yeah, I'd say so. Okay, cool. So given that you're on the inside and I'm not on the inside, who is using Retool and why are they using Retool? Yeah. So the primary reason someone uses Retool is typically they are a backend engineer who's looking to build some sort of internal tool and it involves the front end. And backend engineers typically don't care too much for the frontend. They might not know React, Redux, all that well.

1:11:47And they say, hey, I just want a simple button, simple form on top of my database or API. Why is it so hard? And so that's kind of the core concept behind Retool is frontend web development has gotten so difficult in the past 5, 10, 20 years. It's so complicated today. Put together a simple form with a submit button, have to submit to an API. You have to worry, for example, about, oh, you know, when you press the submit button, you got to bounce it or you got to disable it when it's, you know, is fetching is true. And then when it comes back, you got to enable the button to get or there's an error, you got to display the error message.

1:12:19There's so much crap now with building a simple form like that. And Ritual takes that all away. And so really, I think the core reason why someone would use Ritual is they just don't want to build any more internal tools. I want to save some time. Yeah, clearly the front end has gotten complex. No doubt about that. I think even front enders would agree with that sentiment. And then you have backend folks that already have access to everything, API keys, production database, servers, whatever. But then to just stand up Retool, to me, seems like the next real easy button because you can just remove the entire front end layer complexity.

1:12:53You're not trying to take it away. You're just trying to augment it. You're trying to give developers a given interface, that's Retool, build out your own admin, your own view to a Google Sheet or to the production database, all inside Retool. Let Retool be the front end to the already existing backend. Is that about right? Yeah, that is exactly right. The way we think about it is we want to abstract away things that a developer should not need to focus on, such that a developer can focus on what is truly specific or unique to their business. And so the vision of what we want to build is something like an AWS, actually, where I think AWS really fundamentally transformed the infrastructure layer.

1:13:36Back in the day, developers spent all their time thinking about how do I go rack servers? How do I go manage cooling, manage power supplies? How do I upgrade my database without it going down? How do I change out the hard drive while still being online? All these problems. And they're not problems anymore, because nowadays when you want to upgrade your database, just go to RDS, press a few buttons. And so what AWS did to the infrastructure layer is what we want to do to the application layer, specifically on the front end today. And for me, that's pretty exciting because as a developer myself, I'm not really honestly that interested, for example, in managing infrastructure in a nuts and bolts way.

1:14:14I would much rather be like, hey, I want S3 bucket. Boom, there's an S3 bucket. I want a database. Boom, there's a database. And similarly, on the front end or on the application layer, there is so much crap people have to do today when it comes to building a simple CRUD application. It's like, you know, you probably have to install 10, 15, maybe even 20 different libraries. You probably don't know what most libraries do. It's really complicated to load a simple form. You know, you're probably downloading almost like a megabyte or two of JavaScript. It's so much crap to build a simple form. And so that's kind of the idea behind Retool is could it be a lot simpler?

1:14:46Could we just make it so much faster? Could you go from nothing to a form on top of your database or API in two minutes? We think so. Yeah, I think so too. So listeners, Retool is built for scale. It's built for enterprise. It's built for everyone. And Retool is built for developers. That's you. You can self-host it. You can run it in the cloud. Custom SSO, audit log, SOC 2, type 2, professional services. Starting with Retool is simple, fast. And of course, it's free if you want to try it right now. So go to retool.com slash changelog. That's R-E-T-O-O-L dot com slash changelog.

1:15:29This goes against the Unix philosophy, but is this an argument for integration? You know, owning more of the stack? Because, you know, it's not your problem, but it is your problem. And it's like, of course, you don't want to pick what shell people use, but like does this like now we need the ghosty shell or something because you can solve that problem you know you could have ghosty be more than just a tty i i i fight the nerd snipe every day of my life to write a shell i i that's that's something i'm holding when you're gonna give in man come on when you're gonna give i'm holding strong because there's so many bug reports so many that i get that i am like this is a shell bug not my bug but then you know i do think i do I don't just dismiss it.

1:16:11I do think, can I as a terminal emulator mitigate this bug? But ultimately this is not my bug. And so, yeah, it's frustrating. It's also frustrating because all the cool new post 1.0 features we want to build that we kind of touched on, it's going to be blocked on downstream adoption. It's like any web browser comes out with a feature, it doesn't matter until a website implements it. And so that's going to happen here too. but if we have, I've joked around building a ghosty shell that only works in the ghosty terminal emitter. So it's kind of crap because you would never use it remotely. But like, it's more of a tech demo of like, this is what shells could be if they implement all the capabilities of ghosty.

1:16:50It's kind of like Chrome web experience, web experiments. Like we need the ghosty terminal experiments to like where people visit it. And with the Chrome one, like I would visit it and be like, holy crap, a browser could do this. And then it changed my whole perception of a browser like sometimes years before any website behaved similarly. And I have talked with folks about doing the same thing for terminals. This TUI works best in Ghosty, you know? That's already happening. I think more than people expect. I would say right now like Neovim works best in Ghosty. It works, it degrades great for other things.

1:17:30but I think almost the entire NeoVim maintainer ship is in the Ghosty beta, and it's a collaboration between us implementing something and NeoVim shipping it like two weeks later. And most people have no idea because unless you're in Ghosty, a feature detects it. Those things don't turn on. That's crazy. So if you're using NeoVim, you want to be using Ghosty and maybe vice versa. I'm biased, but yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's - Are you a NeoVim user? I am a NeoVim user, and I don't know how many of the actual NeoVim maintainers actually use Ghosty. They all have access. I don't know how many actually use it, but I know that more than one mains Ghosty all the time.

1:18:09And so, yeah, it's something that NeoVem is always going to work in there. And we're going to work really hard to make it a great experience. Do you pay attention to DHH by any chance? Here and there. If it's loud enough. Sometimes you can't help yourself, but pay attention. Well, not so much his voice and his words, but on YouTube he's given demos of Kamal and other things and I think you always get to see his terminal and his text editor and stuff like that yeah and he's done some cool stuff I haven't paid attention to it deeply I just know it looks cool I'm not even sure what he's you know my back of the brain to do is like go investigate what he's doing because it looks cool like whatever he's using is it yeah you know is it neovim is it something else and then what I've seen too in screenshots you've shared for Ghosty look cool too and so I'm just curious because they look cool I might be making this up.

1:19:00I can't fully remember. I know I know the one. Okay, I'll start with what I know for sure I'm not making up, which is that I've gotten mentioned a lot on Twitter with DHH and others with people telling him or asking him to look into Ghosty. That I know for sure. That happens actually fairly regularly, probably due to the stuff that you're talking about. What I don't know, what I can't remember is I thought he said that he only wants to use software that is publicly available that everyone could use, which is a totally obviously good take because he's shipping stuff that people want to use right away.

1:19:31And I don't think he said that directly in response to Ghosty. I think it was just like a general thing where people sending him stuff to use. But I imagine that that's, you know, a big thing holding him back if he even knows about Ghosty at all. But I hope when it's public that he would at least give it a shake. I've always said, even if you don't use it, I would just like to know why you don't use it. That's perfectly valuable information. So to that point, we asked on X for people to add questions for you. And it seemed like the overwhelming question is the age old question. Is when is this going to be available to the public?

1:20:08When is 1.0 going to drop? Yeah, so we're recording this in December. and I promised it would be released in December and the plan, everything still looks good for December. So sometime this month, I don't have a day. I really don't. It's just sometime this month. I think the software is in a pretty good place. There was a few blockers that I had. One of them was the icon that I wanted to, I wanted a fresh icon for the 1.0. That's done. I tweeted that out and it's in the beta builds already and that's all done. Another one that I'm waiting on is sort of like web design and website docs work. That one, it's all volunteer.

1:20:42I'm not the best at web technologies right now, especially front end. So I have friends helping me with that and I don't want to pressure them. It's the holiday season, things like that. If the website doesn't get done in December, my plan is probably to publicly release without it and just say that's coming later, probably make a bunch of markdown files to kind of help people in the repo with docs. But we'll see about that. But I'd say that's the major thing blocking right now. And then the third thing is sort of some amount of release management. We have nightly builds right now, but I haven't actually written the GitHub Action automation stuff to tag and build like a numbered release.

1:21:20And so I'll have to do that for the 1.0. And obviously that's not a huge blocker. That's probably like a day of focus. So we're still looking good for December. You said the icon is in the beta builds. That means what I have open is the plan to be released version, the icon? The winking ghost. Do you see a winking ghost? Yeah, yeah, that's it. I had to open Terminal.app as well just to sort of side by side because I'm like, this looks, you know, as my son would say, we've been here before. Yeah, that's on purpose. That's on purpose. I like it. It's an homage. You can tell it's, you know, darn near the same except for the thickness of the outside border is a little bit thicker for Ghosty.

1:21:59And the background is bluish instead of blackish. Yeah, obviously. There's obvious differences. I would say if you can open the terminal icon, then the 512 or 1000 pixel version and open the ghosty one in the 512. One thing we did with the designer who did this is a well-known, really awesome. I've been a fan for so long. So I was actually really excited to actually get an icon designed by this person that I've been a fan for icons. But one thing he does really well, which is very Apple-esque, is that the level of detail in the icon differs based on the size of it. So if you're looking at it in the dock versus the big version, it's different.

1:22:34So look at the big version and compare because it's super an homage to terminal.app. But we tried to add a level of depth and reality. So things like the aluminum border has texture. The pixels, you could see the individual pixels of the screen and they were warped because the screen is curved. There's a soft glow around the ghost, things like that. So yeah, I just want to call it out because he worked hard on it and I think it's cool. and I think it also shows sort of the level of detail that we've been thinking about with this software. I've got it open now. The little dots, the little pixels are really cool, little subtle details.

1:23:09What's the designer's name? Michael, I don't know how to pronounce the last name, Flareup. His company is Pixel Resort, I think. Yeah, you could see his whole portfolio on that. He's done hundreds and hundreds of icons over more than a decade and a really big fan of his work. to this day after decades using computers i still nerd out on a really cool app icon i just i love the beautiful app icons and like just the people that make them you know so i don't know this guy but i appreciate him and i'm sure i would love to go to his website and look at all the things he's made a lot of good stuff i mean just eye candy just pure eye candy and you know how hard it is to like do that well yeah and he's still doing a little bit more work for ghosty and i'll just hint i mean it's going to be more than a hint i'll talk about what it is it won't be in for 1.0, but probably shortly afterward, we're making it so that the icon, we're going to dynamically change the color to match your theme.

1:24:03So on disk, it's always got to be sort of the default, but when it's running, Apple provides APIs where you could add a custom image, and we want to make it so that the bluish color will actually be your actual background color and the text and things like that, and it's just going to happen automatically. Nice. Yeah, yeah. So how much SwiftUI is in here? How much percentage of the code base? I don't have it open in front of me, but I think something like 10 % of the code base is Swift right now, which is kind of scary. Yeah, and that's why I think that I've harped on this so much, but that's why I think libghosty is so important because it shows the amount of work that goes into building an end-state app is how much code is required and stuff.

1:24:44So, yeah, I think there's a lot of Swift in there, a lot of Apple-specific functionality. So you imagine over time that percentage goes down, I would imagine it would have to, as you support other things, add stuff to the core. Or do you think that the Swift, you'll continue to sling Swift in the... Well, I think we'll always have the sort of flagship implementation consumer of Ghosty, which will probably be like the Ghosty Mac app and Linux app. And so the Swift code will only increase, but I'm not sure percentage-wise what that looks like as the core functionality changes and stuff. I'm really not sure.

1:25:23What were your other major bloggers before the 1.0? You announced it was coming. I think that was a couple of months ago. Yeah. But what were things besides a rad icon update that would block it, the website you mentioned, from failing to launch in December? There was a number of features that, there was a certain amount of stability, obviously. Stability is hard to quantify, though. It sort of is more of a feeling of when you get enough beta testers that aren't reporting bugs. That was sort of a vibe. But in terms of features, there was a list of features that we wanted to implement and performance metrics we wanted to hit.

1:25:55So just things like supporting image protocols and like ways to do input and making sure. I basically went out and just looked at all the available functionality that terminals have and asked myself whether it's important to have it. And that was sort of a marker because that 1.0 goal was to be the best existing terminal. You know, you kind of have to do most of what existing terminals do. I drew the line at like terminal stuff, not like UI stuff, because there's a lot of terminals out there that'll do like SSH libraries and double click and you can just go straight in and things like that. I sort of drew the line where when I say existing terminal, I mean the functionality below that line.

1:26:31But that was sort of the goal. I mean, I think the one feature that was always, there's two things that were always to me a release blocker that I've not given up on. I've just like, you know, I've let go in terms of blocking the release, but we're going to still do it. One of them is a totally graphical configuration mechanism because for Mac and Linux users, for the vast majority of users, they don't want to be editing a text file to doing their configuration. So we do want to build a native UI to manage your config, and that's still coming and for sure something we'll do. And then the second thing, which is, I think, a really big deal, and I think a lot of people will probably be not very happy about with the 1.0, is search.

1:27:12I don't know if you noticed that yet, but command F doesn't work. It doesn't do anything. I have not noticed. So surprisingly, we have something like 5 ,000 active beta testers right now. Really surprisingly, it's not been a big issue. I thought within the first month of beta testing, when we had 50 people, that people would say, oh, this is not usable because there's no search. I don't use search in the terminal, clearly, because it hasn't been built yet. But I thought that would really pop up. And we're 5 ,000 people in. And I think that issue by far has the most upvotes. It has something like 120 or 150 or something.

1:27:47But, you know, it hasn't stopped a considerable amount of people from using it. And so that's what changed my view on let's just slip this post 1.0. It's an important thing to add, but I think there's a huge number of people that'll still get value without it. So it is something like you'll see in the 1.0 release blog posts. So I'm going to call it out directly because I don't want people to think I'm like trying to make some message about not supporting search we'll support it eventually but yeah well i didn't notice that because i guess i don't use search either i just use ctrl r which is yeah yeah i use tmux and a2n and just the tools inside the shell there so yeah so any tmux user wouldn't wouldn't notice because search doesn't work in any terminal with tmux right yeah cool what else is there anything that you were expecting us to ask you about that we haven't or that you wanted us to you're just waiting for it we just haven't delivered waiting waiting waiting um but there was a question actually on on x that i saw that I was like, no one's actually ever asked.

1:28:41And I never thought about before, before they asked it. So was this the Neo Vim one? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, he made me think and I was like, that is an interesting question. Let's give him a shout out. I do have it. Mark, Jake with or Jack with, are there any specific features besides speed that make Neo Vim better in Ghosty? Is that the one you're talking about? Yeah. And I think it's a good question because it's not, we have talked about how Neo Vim is, is good in Ghosty, but I think more generally the question to me was like, what, what, makes a terminal interesting that you wouldn't really notice, I guess, until you actually used it.

1:29:15And I think that that's something that people don't realize a lot. Because I think the biggest one is there's so many terminal.app users, like serious, very online developers that are using terminal.app. And it's funny to me, because it's such a bad terminal. And just to be very concrete about that. Like it's only supports, I think, 256 colors. And there's so many people out there that don't realize that terminals for over a decade have supported 32 bit color. And you don't realize it because all terminal programs, almost all terminal programs do such a good job of gracefully degrading and just realizing what environment they're in and working.

1:29:55And so if you only ever ran something like NeoVim in terminal app, it obviously works great there. You would only ever see 256 colors and then you run something in ghosty and suddenly you're like wait why does syntax highlight highlighting look better or something like that it's because you know you're using full like rgb with some transparency and things like start popping in and so yeah i mean i think that one of the things that that stands out immediately is because ghosty supports modern like input protocols for example you could bind every key and i think there's a ton of people i've talked to that don't realize you can't bind in every key not because they haven't tried it but because they tried it, it didn't work and decided, eh, that's just how it is.

1:30:35I'm never going to do that again. But realizing it's just because most terminals are built on like a 50 year old input stack. But if you look at kitty or go see, I think Wes term also supports it. Alacrity does not. But if you look at if you look at like those three, for example, then you can now bind things like backspace and escape could be separate before like when if you bound escape and you press backspace it would trigger escape now they could actually be distinguished and things like that and i think that that enables a lot more functionality and things like that so i guess my view is is there's a lot of people out there i've talked to where it's just like i'm happy in terminal app and like i'm happy they're happy but it's one of those things where i described it like a retina screen that apple shipped like you don't realize how good it is until you use it and i'm not even pitching ghosty here like i'm pitching any modern terminal like just give it a shot because I don't think most people know what they're missing out on.

1:31:30Yeah, I concur with that. Jared was, well, I think you, do you still use Terminal, Jared? I do. Okay, so you can really speak to this well. I'm speaking to you directly. No, I'm happy to hear it. It's because he has a different way of thinking. He wants to use Mac. I'm a minimalist, so I don't want to install unless I have a good reason to. I'm not against, I use iTerm2 for a while and I was like, what is this doing for me? And maybe it's because I've been ignorance is bliss over here in the ignorant land of 256. 256. I think Tmux requires extra config in order to take advantage of some of these modern things, which is unfortunate because they are detectable.

1:32:04But yeah, that might be part of the reason too. Yeah, possibly. So I have good things to look forward to now that I'm using Ghosty. One thing I did notice, which I used to use way back in the day, I think on Linux, and I love is you got this, I call it visor mode, you know, fly down from the top. Yeah, That's a cool thing. I love that when I was in college because I make everybody think I look cool. And I was like, you know, like, what'd you, how'd you do that? Yeah, that's a cool feature. That was definitely, I won't lie, part of implementing that feature was like the, I'll just say like marketing factor of it, just like the cool factor for sure.

1:32:40But, but, you know, really also was how many people came and said, like, they must have that to use this terminal because iTerm supports it. And I think iTerm is the only terminal that supports it. I think so too. I think that's the one thing I lost when I switched back. I was like, I don't use it much anymore because it was kind of a novelty. But it's cool. Now that I got, now I'm back to it. I'm like, Ooh, I should use this. Now, can you map that to like a global hotkey? So you don't have to be, okay. Yes, you can. And yeah, there's, there's actually a couple beta testers. Blows my mind that they are full-time professional software engineers and they exclusively use that as their terminal.

1:33:18They don't use, they have no floating windows. I would love to watch them work. I did too. Yeah. So they, they're coming from iterm and they're like, I only have one terminal and, and, and, uh, ghosty language is called the quick terminal. It's like, I only use the quick terminal. So they're finding some really interesting bugs because it was like, they're sort of getting fixed now, but they're, they're using it so heavily, but I never imagined people would use it without another floating window, which complicates like if you have three screens, which screen does it float down from? And like things like that, they're finding some good stuff and uh it's all it's all gonna that's all gonna get fixed before 1.0 but it's it's it's very interesting how how diverse the user base is out there let's test your config knowledge mitchell i have the config open if i want to i want to i want to bind a key to this quick what is it called quick what quick terminal quick terminal how do i do it okay well one if you don't want to bind a key it's in the menu so if you just want to see what it looked like it's Oh, really?

1:34:11Right. I've played there. Yeah, I've done that. It's in Vue, I think. Yeah, Vue Quick Terminal. That's not very practical as a way to use it. It's more of a discovery mechanism. Do you still want to know the config to bind? Yes, I do. That's why I asked. Okay, so keybind, all one word, K-U-I-B-I-N-D, equals, space or no space, I don't care, equals, and then let's just bind it to something dumb. Let's just type the letter J, colon. Yeah, we'll bind it to J for now. You could replace that later. J colon and then toggle underscore quick underscore terminal. Okay. And then save it and then hit command comma that'll reload your config and then hit J.

1:34:52I must have fat fingered it because my, oh wait, the config opened up or something. You might have hit command shift comma. I think I might have done that, yeah. Oh yeah, command shift comma is actually what you need to reload. Command comma does open it. Yeah, I was like, what is this? Yeah. Oh, I fat fingered it. configuration errors speaking of stealing from the browsers i also just found your terminal inspector yes it's very much like in the spirit of dev tools right like inspect element inspect terminal this is cool i'm surprised we actually i was surprised i forgot to mention that yeah i i am gonna age myself a bit here especially given my discord community but i remember the pre inspector days and specifically i remember when firebug launched firebug maybe yes yes and i was an active Rails developer, web developer when Firebug launched.

1:35:43And yeah, overnight, web development got so much better. And I felt like you could do so much more because of the visibility it gave you. And the terminal inspector still has a long way to go to get there. But that's what I was thinking of when I built that was like, I want this to be a text platform where people could build applications. And to do that, you need good debuggers and debugging tools. And I felt that with a terminal inspector similar to fire. We need the fire bug of terminals. And that truly was the motivation for that. Yeah, super cool. Nice and simple. DevTools has gotten very feature rich over the years when you fire it up in Chrome.

1:36:19And it's pretty complicated at this point. I mean, there's courses on how to use DevTools. I like, and fire bug was so simple. I mean, it was game changing, but it was basic compared to what we have now. And I like how straightforward and basic this is. Just to even just, I just grokked it immediately, even just as a non-developer. on this thing. It's just, it's sweet. Yeah, it's cool. And I think it educates people more. Yeah. Like, I don't know if this will be true about terminals, but I suspect it will because with the inspector, I've had non-developer friends find that feature in browsers and just like click around.

1:36:52And they've sort of mentioned to me like, oh, I realized I could change the color of this thing and that's how that works. And, you know, it's just sort of like some sort of education. And I'm hoping that there's like terminal people, users that aren't ever going to build a terminal application, but we'll open that inspector and just kind of, yeah, you know, mess around and be like, oh, that's probably how that works in a terminal. And yeah. I'm stoked. A new terminal option has arrived. That's right. The terminal option has arrived. It's the and terminal. There's no ors here. Yeah, that's right.

1:37:24You get this and that and that. I love it. Love the icon. Love the icon work too. Very good. Love the MIT license. I mean, what's not to love about this? I don't know. i don't know i don't know i don't know that's why everyone's so excited mitchell i guess that's the uh the lack of availability of course if you're listening to this it's probably out there unless you're listening to this the day that we ship because you know this coming out mid-december if you're not listening to this if you're if it's late december if it's january go download ghosty right now what will the url be for ghosty uh it's gonna be ghosty.org okay i already i I already have it.

1:38:01And that's what it'll be to match the GitHub org is ghosty-org. So, yeah. Gotcha. Let's replace the dash with the dot. Well, you're doing it right, Mitchell. I appreciate all this open sourcing it, the technical philanthropy, reinventing an awesome terminal from the ground up. I appreciate it. I'm here for it. You've got me out of terminal.app. We'll see if I stick around. I probably will, especially because I can just bring this quick terminal down and impress all my friends again. If my greatest social good is getting people out of Terminal.app, then I will die happy. Impact, baby. Impact. Thank you very much.

1:38:40Yeah, I'm happy to be back. Like I said, I listened to that episode from 2012. So it's funny to be here, what, 13 years later. Like a time capsule. It is. How about that? It's cool. I even sound, my wife was listening as I had it playing, and she said I sound like a child. and I was a child. So yeah, maybe I'll look back in 13 years and say I'm now a child right now. But you've grown up, man. Hopefully. It's crazy. All right. Thanks again. Bye, y 'all. So Ghosty for Christmas 1.0 coming soon, coming this month. But will it arrive before actual Christmas Day? Will it be a present for all of us developers?

1:39:20Maybe the better question is, will it become the terminal of 2025 for most of us? That's the question. I know for me, it needs to have warp-like input into the terminal. I love that about warp personally. And I'm sure that Mitchell has great heights that he'll reach with this. LibGhosty, potentially a shell. Who knows? But I have to have warp-like input into my prompt. I just love that about warp. Okay, go to ghosty.org. That's G-H-O-S-T-T-Y dot O-R-G. but if that site isn't available yet go to the show notes we have links there for you and Ghosty 1.0 is coming soon okay one more note it was so cool to catch up with Mitchell Hashimoto after all these years after all this accomplishment to have the history we have with him to go back to the beginning before HashiCorp the start of Vagrant just the project and to now see where he's gone and what he's doing now to me that's the coolest thing about this podcast I love that Okay, last interview show of the year.

1:40:26Enjoy your holidays. Enjoy your family. Enjoy your time away. Enjoy the hacking you're going to do if your plan is to take some time off and just get some things done. That's fun stuff, hobbies, tinkering, new side projects, whatever. And we'll see you in Zulip throughout the break. Go to changelog.com slash community. Join our Zulip. Chat with us in real time. There's a lot of people there. And I'm sure you'll dig it. Big thanks to our friends and our partners over at fly.io. We love fly. Give them some love this holiday season. If you're launching a new app or taking some of the production fly.io and to our sleep science experts over at eight sleep with their pod for ultra.

1:41:11I love that thing. It is the coolest thing ever. Eight sleep.com slash change law. Get yours today. 350 bucks off. You can't beat that. And to our friends over at Wix and Wix studio. Wix.com slash studio And to our friends at Retool Retool.com We love Retool, it's so cool And a big thank you to the Beat Freak In Residence Breakmaster Cylinder Those beats, banging Banging, banging Love you BMC Okay friends, we'll see you this Friday for the last Episode of the year for Chainshawken Friends Bringing you State of the Log 2024 Lots of cool voicemails lots of cool Breakmaster remixes. And after that, we'll see you in 2025.

1:41:56Thanks for listening.

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1:42:51Thank you.