Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub – Mitchell Hashimoto

Writing this makes me irrationally sad, but Ghostty will be leaving GitHub¹.

I’m GitHub user 1299, joined Feb 2008.

Since then, I’ve opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per
day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there
(I’d love to see the data), but I can’t imagine more than a week per year.

GitHub is the place that has made me the most happy. I always made time for
it. When I went through tough breakups? I lost myself in open source… on
GitHub. During college at 4 AM when everyone is passed out? Let me get one
commit in. During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub.
It’s where I’ve historically been happiest and wanted to be.

Even the annoying stuff! Some people doom scroll social media. I’ve been doom
scrolling GitHub issues since before that was a word. On vacations I’d have
bookmarks of different projects on GitHub I wanted to study. Not just source
code, but OSS processes, how other maintainers react to difficult situations.
Etc. Believe it or not, I like this.

Some might call this sick, but my hobby and work and passion all align and for
most of my life they got to also live in one place on the internet: GitHub.

Did you know I started Vagrant (my first successful open source project) in
large part because I hoped it would get me a job at GitHub? It’s no secret,
I’ve said this repeatedly, and in my first public talk about Vagrant, when I
was a mere 20 years old, I joked “maybe GitHub will hire me if it’s good!”

GitHub was my dream job. I didn’t ever get to work there (not their fault).
But it was the perfect place I wanted to be. The engineers were incredible,
the product was incredible, and it was something I lived and breathed every
day. I still do and consistently have… for these 18 years. Enough time for
an entire human to become an adult, all on GitHub.

Lately, I’ve been very publicly critical of GitHub. I’ve been mean about it.
I’ve been angry about it. I’ve hurt people’s feelings. I’ve been lashing out.
Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is
irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing,
and I’m mad at it. I’m sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on
it.

I’ve felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I’ve kept a journal
where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively
impacted my ability to work². Almost every day has an X. Just the day I am
writing this post, I’ve been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because
there is a GitHub Actions outage³. This is no longer a place for serious
work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.

It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn’t
want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn’t want me to get
work done. I want to ship software and it doesn’t want me to ship software.

I want it to be better, but I also want to code. And I can’t code with GitHub
anymore. I’m sorry. After 18 years, I’ve got to go. I’d love to come back one
day, but this will have to be predicated on real results and improvements,
not words and promises.

I’ll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in
the coming months. We have a plan but I’m also very much still in discussions
with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS).

It’ll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a
plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible. We plan on keeping a
read-only mirror available on GitHub at the current URL.

My personal projects and other work will remain on GitHub for now.
Ghostty is where myself, our maintainers, and our open source community are
most impacted so that is the focus of this change. We’ll see where it
goes after that.