Mitchell Hashimoto, one of the founders of HashiCorp and lead developer behind Ghostty, a GPU-accelerated open-source terminal emulator launched in 2023, announced that the app has formally become a non-profit project through fiscal sponsorship by Hack Club, a registered 501©(3) organization.
In Ghostty’s case, Hack Club now manages compliance, donations, accounting, and public financial transparency. Hashimoto says this structure reinforces Ghostty’s commitment to remaining free and open source, provides legal assurances to users and contributors, and establishes a sustainable foundation beyond any single individual’s involvement.
Say you have a large amount of data going to stdout for some reason (e.g. dmesg for a system that’s been online or a year). Your terminal will take time to render this to the screen, and a reasonable way to do draws may be line by line in the text. The terminal may also have an XXX MB buffer, where it will draw however many lines it can at a time.
If the buffer fills, then you are forced to wait for a draw to occur before more data can go in. This locks the whole pipeline. With a lot of data this can block the terminal buffering, the stdout buffet, printf() from the other program, etc.
The GPU rendering helps alleviate this by offloading some of this rendering work to the GPU, which had its own buffers, etc., and is likely able to draw everything to the screen quicker than the CPU could regardless. This results in a smoother pipeline overall.
A good counter example of this is to use a physical terminal/console, like a serial port with a low baud rate (e.g. /dev/ttyS0 on a raspberry pi). If you run dmesg on one of these devices, you can literally see the text being printed line by line.
This also comes at a cost of CPU cycles and power. If you have a GPU, and it can perform efficient and quick rendering, why would you not use it? It probably shouldn’t be the only reason to use a terminal emulator, but it’s an added bonus, and there are a few now that support it that you can pick from.