July 9, 2026
Terminally online, naturally
Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
Tech legend talks terminals, and the comments instantly turn into a Zig vs Rust food fight
TLDR: Hashimoto says Ghostty started as a personal learning project after years away from hands-on coding, then grew because people actually wanted to use it. Readers turned that into a louder story about Zig vs Rust, with some inspired by his honesty and others rolling their eyes at the language-drama sideshow.
Mitchell Hashimoto — the software builder behind a small mountain of developer tools — sat down to talk about his new terminal app Ghostty, his love of the programming language Zig, and why he wanted to get his hands dirty again after years of running a company. On paper, it’s a calm, thoughtful interview about making old-school text tools faster, simpler, and more useful. In the comments? Absolute language-war energy.
The biggest flare-up came from readers who latched onto the Zig-vs-Rust subtext and refused to let go. One person flat-out said they dislike Rust’s “culture,” only for another to fire back that Zig gives them the exact same bad vibes. A third commenter basically begged everyone to calm down, saying Hashimoto could have just said he likes Zig better without turning it into community drama. Translation for non-coders: imagine a celebrity saying they prefer Android over iPhone and the replies instantly becoming a 200-comment identity crisis.
Not everyone came for blood, though. Some readers were genuinely impressed by Hashimoto’s vibe: a successful founder going back to basics, building something nerdy because he wanted to learn, not because he had a grand sales pitch. One fan said the interview was so inspiring it literally got them off the couch and back to the desk. Meanwhile, another thread veered into the very online fantasy that software should fork more often — only to get hit with a reality check that maintaining your own version is basically signing up for endless homework. So yes, Ghostty got attention, but the real show was the crowd: part admiration, part language tribalism, part motivational poster, and fully internet.
Key Points
- •Mitchell Hashimoto says he started Ghostty after leaving HashiCorp to deepen his skills in GPU programming, desktop/single-node systems programming, and Zig.
- •He initially treated Ghostty as a learning project to understand terminal emulators and aimed only to run tools like Vim and a compiler before possibly discarding it.
- •Hashimoto says he continued developing Ghostty after concluding the existing terminal ecosystem lacked a fast, feature-rich, natively cross-platform option.
- •He argues that terminals should preserve the strengths of text-based applications, especially quick implementation, clearer security boundaries, composition, automation, and scriptability.
- •He identifies PTY in-band signaling and unstructured byte streams as a core terminal limitation and points to structured-data approaches such as PowerShell as useful examples.