Top all-time · #265
Mitchell Hashimoto
Personal blog · mitchellh.com/writing · on HN as mitchellhprogrammingsystems
Mitchell Hashimoto's personal blog at mitchellh.com covers programming and systems. Since 2013, 184 different Hacker News readers have linked it 250 times, most often “Ghostty”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mostly as a reference for his posts on Ghostty, Zig, Nix, SIMD, terminal grapheme handling and AI coding agents, with few comments on the writing itself.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Called a fun read; one commenter says they really like his post on building Ghostty on different platforms.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Mitchell Hashimoto's personal website.
Most-linked posts?
- Ghostty16 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2023-09-23
- Using Nix with Dockerfiles (2023)14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2023-04-23
- Contributing to complex projects11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2022-03-14
- Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2023-10-02
- Ghostty is new terminal emulator written from scratch in Zig8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2023-09-13
- Libghostty is coming8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-09-22
- My startup banking story (2023)8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-03-14
- My AI Adoption Journey8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2026-02-05
- My approach to building large technical projects (2023)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-06-01
- Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-10-11
What Hacker News says?
Check "Why Zig" slide from this talk https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-pattern...
Comment linking /writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-patterns
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted Ghostty is now non-profit as a story · 1343 points
HN discussionDiscussed near the last part of an earlier post. “… exploring not-for-profit structures to help ensure the long-term sustainability of Ghostty.” https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming
Comment linking /writing/ghostty-is-coming
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted Libghostty is coming as a story · 828 points
HN discussionhttps://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming
Comment linking /writing/ghostty-is-coming
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted Pledging $300k to the Zig Software Foundation as a story · 544 points
HN discussionApple Terminal has a lot of problems. As others have mentioned, it lacks support for 24 bit color, enforces minimum contrast ratios without any ability to disable them (meaning you cannot set arbitrary color themes), is hopelessly bad at Unicode rendering (particularly with multi-codepoint graphemes, see [1]), and in general misbehaves in other myriad ways [2][3][4]. With both Ghostty and iTerm2 now freely available…
Comment linking /writing/grapheme-clusters-in-terminals
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted Zig builds are getting faster as a story · 434 points
HN discussionMitchell has a 5 min lightning talk discussing performance of ghostty which is worth a quick watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPaGkEesw20&t=3015s It's one of those things that you don't realize how poor the performance is until you experience something better. Mentioned from his blog: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming
Comment linking /writing/ghostty-is-coming
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application as a story · 428 points
HN discussionFor those interested, the link below from Mitchell's blog explains the different goals he's trying to reach, compared to other terminal emulators. https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-is-coming
Comment linking /writing/ghostty-is-coming
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted My approach to building large technical projects (2023) as a story · 384 points
HN discussion<3 This has been a work of passion for the past two years of my life (off and on). I hope anyone who uses this can feel the love and care I put into this, and subsequently the amazing private beta community (all ~5,000 strong!) that helped improve and polish this into a better release than I ever could alone. Ghostty got a lot of hype (I cover this in my reflection below), but I want to make sure I call out that the…
Comment linking /writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted You Have to Feel It as a story · 381 points
HN discussionFor those who don’t have the background: - created by Mitchell (founder of HashiCorp) - it’s developed in Zig (and Mitchell recently pledge $300k to Zig foundation) - uses native UI (which is super rare for cross platform app) - amazingly performant. e.g. https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/111919642467789362 - has lots of amazing small details like below https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/113330304084905500 https://hachyd…
Comment linking /writing/ghostty-is-coming
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted My startup banking story (2023) as a story · 337 points
HN discussionThe author has a dev log I’d recommend if you’re curious about what makes it different + general goodies on Zig/terminal emulators. https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
Comment linking /ghostty
on “Ghostty 1.0”Submitted Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature as a story · 334 points
HN discussionThe issue the OP mentions was likely a known memory-leak in Ghostty that has since been fixed. Claude was triggering the bug in Ghostty but the bug was in Ghostty. Ghostty's author blogged about it https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-memory-leak-fix
Comment linking /writing/ghostty-memory-leak-fix
on “Ghostty 1.4”Submitted Ghostty is leaving GitHub as a story · 231 points
HN discussionStart with the person that is instrumental in this - Mitchell Hashimoto - you probably use products built on top of or with his tooling somewhere in your daily life already without knowing it. https://mitchellh.com/ I suspect you're getting down voted on this as it feels like this is a failure to educate yourself on something that feels like it should be relatively easy to do so in less time than it took to type you…
Comment linking /
on “Ghostty 1.4”Submitted A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501) as a story · 188 points
HN discussionhttps://mitchellh.com/writing/superlogical Because this company, and the superlogical idea intially emphasized building the terminal multiplexer for the agentic age.
Comment linking /writing/superlogical
on “Ghostty 1.4”Submitted Zig build system internals as a story · 154 points
HN discussionMitchell Hashimoto (founder of Hashicorp [0]) did something similar to this, but to find open slots in courses he wanted in college according to his blog [1]. You're on the right track. From the linked page: "As I began college, I noticed that the poor technical design of the registration system made it incredibly difficult to get the set of classes I wanted. I developed automated registration software that would de…
Comment linking /writing/automation-obsessed
on “I had to take down my course-swapping site or be expelled”Submitted Comparing Filesystem Performance in Virtual Machines as a story · 123 points
HN discussionThe core client SDK is pretty small -- it's about 10K LOC. We want to get the core abstractions right in JS-based environments, than expand. We really like Mitchel Hashimoto's post about how he built Ghostty on different platforms [1] [1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/zig-and-swiftui
Comment linking /writing/zig-and-swiftui
on “Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase”Submitted Contributing to complex projects as a story · 95 points
HN discussionLittle offtop: would someone remember mitchellh's setup for working with AI tools? I remember someone posted in an AI-hate-love threads here and it's not in the his blog[1] 1: https://mitchellh.com/writing
Comment linking /writing
on “AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions”Submitted Ghostty 1.0 Is Coming as a story · 94 points
HN discussion
