Comment by Trufa
3 hours ago
Do you think there's entry barrier, even if pride based or psychological, to the fact that libghostty is called so rather that something more generic?
Let's say I'm the creator of Alacritty, would I have more problems adding libghostty than it's generically named identical counterpart libtermengine?
I'm not concerned with it.
The real goal isn't for Alacrity or Kitty or WezTerm or any other terminal to use libghostty. I think over the long term, terminal emulator user bases dwindle down to niche (but important) use cases.
The real goal is for higher-level tooling (GUI or browser) that utilizes terminal-like programs to have something like libghostty to reach for. I think this represents the much, much larger ecosystem out there that likely touches many more people. For example, Neovim's terminal mode, terminal multiplexers, PaaS build systems, agentic tooling, etc. You're seeing this emerge in force already with the awesome-libghostty repo.
libghostty would still be useful for traditional terminal emulators to replatform on, and for example xterm.js is seriously looking into it (and I'm happy to help and even offered their maintainer a maintainer spot on libghostty). But, they're not the goal. And if fragile egos hold people back, it's really not my problem, it's theirs.
As an outsider to the fascinating world of terminal emulators... can you explain why this might be? Rather, what about `libghostty` would be off-putting vs `libtermengine`?
Just that it's a specific "product"-y sounding name? Would you also be concerned about "libwayland" vs "libcompositor"? Genuinely curious: this seems like an insightful question, I just don't follow the reasoning.
Disclaimer: I am not the maintainer of anything terminal related, it's just an intuition.
Let's say I'm the creator of ghostty "competition".
The fact that is has the same name, could feel if I change that:
- Maybe my users start thinking why don't I use ghostty instead - Will the maintainers of libghostty chose more oriented to ghostty than for my terminal?
It's a half assed analogy, but think if Google's V8 would be called ChromeEngine instead of V8.