> I hate things in "if you know then you know" category. This is one of them.

> Documentation? Reading a manual for an unknown thing?

Well. Yes? Maybe I'm assuming too much, but I feel like the target audience here (terminal emulator 'enthusiasts') either know about this already or are totally willing to go over to the manual to read what it is. The very first section upon opening the documentation explains it succinctly: Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

I wouldn't word it that strongly, however I would've like to see the first line of the documention on the homepage :)

I'll give it a spin later, looks interesting.

Well, it is named GhosTTY. TTY being in the end, it is a terminal emulator. That's obvious to me. Just like AlacriTTY, PuTTY, KiTTY, etc.

I swear this makes 1000% sense but it never occurred to me before.

I thought it was some modern cowsay with a ghost in the tty.

The description is in the documentation. What’s the trouble by clicking on it? It won’t take a second.

I don't know whether it's going to take a second or half a minute. I also don't know whether there will be an answer on the first page, or there's going to be a cute image and then I'll need to find "Getting Started" to learn how to get started with unknown project. My subjective experience on the internet is that if the gate isn't labelled, there's unlikely value on the other side.

> I don't know whether it's going to take a second or half a minute.

You know how you could find out how long it's going to take? By clicking the button. It's free. It's easy. Hell, it would've taken you less time to click that single button and read the first sentence than it would have taken you to post this comment.

You didn't even bother to spend half a second actually opening the documentation page and then you come here complaining about how you don't know whats in the documentation. This is entirely a problem of your own creation. What gives?

People who are interested in this are talking about it because they're interested in it. Nobody is trying to convert you.

People who are interested in things learn about them at different times. You make it seem like it's "learn about it at the outset or gtfo".

And it might be that next month there's a different homepage with more details. For a launch where all "marketing" has been via blog post, discord, and discussions across various nerdy social media sites…I'm more than happy for them to have some fun to celebrate this.

There are people who have been watching this for a few months waiting for it to go 1.0 — and, at least on day 1, "if you know, you know."

Whatever dude, you hating because of a missing label on the intro page.

Yeah I agree. To me the "If you know you know" mentality is a negative signal about something, suggesting that something is possibly seen as cool/trendy (which is a negative signal against being the most practical/utilitarian/unsexy solution).

just different tastes i guess

midjourney still has the same thing on their homepage and i dig it

Yeah I was wondering why there’s an ascii animation at #1 on HN. Flash back to 2008.

This isn't a company, I'm not trying to convince you to use it, this is more of a personal art project. If that doesn't vibe with you that's completely fine. You're happy to not use it. I'm happy whether you use it or not. It's all good mate.

(The first sentence in the docs page does explain what it is but if that's too much for you, it's all good.)

I think the documentation does a very good job in the first sentence of describing the project. Not sure why the tone of the commenter was so offended they had to click on a single button to find that.

But... don't you want people to use it? You seem passionate about it otherwise.

I'll admit, I almost didn't click past the animation either. I did, and the doc quickly answered "what is it?", but why not just put that sentence on the landing page? I don't get the unnecessary obscurity either.

I had the same problem. I digged through it only cos it was #1 in HN so I knew something's up. If I had come across this any other way, I wouldn't bother looking past the home page. I don't think you have to be selling the project (financially or otherwise). But you will lose a lot of potential users cos you didn't add the description you have in docs right there in the home page.

> Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.

Now after reading it, the name makes so much sense as well. GhosTTY. My first thought was alternative to ghost.org or something.

Fair. And I'm not here to convince you to cater to everyone. The explanation might be on the first page of the doc, but unless you click on it, you won't know. My prior experience is that docs don't necessarily tell "what" but rather "how" which means that you need to know why you're there. Their weight also varies. Thus, I learned to not speculate how many clicks and real time it's going to take me to learn about the project. If the author doesn't want me to know it, I won't be digging into it.

I enjoy personal projects and if you're saying that this is your personal - all the best! Given high praise count it's likely very good.

It's constructive criticism. You don't have to respond with "Well get fucked then"

It's okay to filter people out who are too uninterested to click a "Documentation" link yet vocal enough to come post about it.

It works for https://www.midjourney.com/home and apparently this project too with its 1100+ upvotes.

No, it isn't okay to filter people out for giving helpful feedback solely because you don't like the feedback.

It's especially not okay to be so rude on HN. "Please don't post shallow dismissals"

I would think, or hope, that this guideline is geared towards protecting a years-long effort such as writing a performant, feature-rich terminal emulator, rather than a comment which takes 5 minutes max to draft.

Not clicking on a documentation link on a technical project is the definition of a shallow dismissal in my opinion.

No. The rule is about protecting a culture. Having a brief description on the front page is an eminently reasonable suggestion. Mitchell's response was a shallow dismissal of the person (calls out "you" five times in six sentences) and was against site guidelines.

Which culture would that be? Starting off a post with “I hate things… this is one of them”?

I think the discussion here would be different if the tone was more moderated. Seems like you’re dying on a hill for the right to be abrasive without consequence.

The original commenter posted a shallow dismissal by putting the effort into posting a comment without clicking a single button on the page :)

No. He didn't post any kind of dismissal at all.

The feedback provided wasn't helpful. You're absolutely correct in that shallow dismissals aren't kind, but you're wrong about who was shallow and who was not. OP didn't dismiss anyone, nor was their comment shallow. And they don't owe you or anyone else anything as far as "explanation" goes, and they can filter out whoever the hell they want. Click the link and look further, or don't.

Meanwhile, dr_ketyn's comment was both rude and not constructive in the slightest (here's a tip: starting feedback with "I hate this" isn't constructive or kind).

> You're happy to not use it. I'm happy whether you use it or not.

I think you misunderstood the OP. The criticism was about the landing page, not the project.

And fwiw, it's not unwarranted. Putting the words "terminal emulator" somewhere on the page would make less people bounce off. You may be fine with them bouncing off, but still, I think it was meant as constructive criticism.

> I hate things in "if you know then you know" category. This is one of them.

A little too constructive I guess.

You're right, maybe I read the post a bit too charitably.

Can you please greet the things that are new to you in a more welcoming spirit? At least as long as you're posting here. What we want on this site (other sites may differ) is a spirit of curiosity [1]. If you post in a "you're doing it wrong" or "you're not providing me with the information I deserve" spirit, that not only isn't the curiosity we're hoping for, it dampens the entire thread for everybody.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Edit: I just saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519739, which means you already covered the point, but I'll leave this up pour encourager les autres.