Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
Mitchell Hashimoto was behind Vagrant , Packer , Consul , Terraform , Vault , Nomad , Waypoint and now builds Ghostty and Vouch .
In this interview, we talk about terminals, Zig and open source.
You’ve been interviewed a lot . Why do people like to interview you?
In interviews, everyone comes from a different angle. Many people want to know how the software engineering to business founder mindset transition went. Then others are interested in product stuff, the work I did at Hashicorp or Ghostty now. What’s different here is there’s no known agenda coming into it; neither of us have anything to sell.
What do you find so fun about terminals? Like, why Ghostty?
I spent ~15 years building CLI applications (not TUIs like we see nowadays). Through that process, I accidentally learned how to color things, move cursors etc. Leaving Hashicorp, I wanted to sharpen my technical skills (where they’d grown dull from neglect) and specifically work on: Pre-AI GPU programming, desktop/single node systems programming (spending so much time on the distributed side where you didn’t worry about cache locality or vector operations, since network costs dominated). I also really wanted to play with Zig. I wanted to satisfy those 3 things.