Ghostty- maybe, but not libghostty.

I suspect Ghostty is to Rex what Chromium is to Google Chrome (without all the negative connotations that is, I’m a happy Rex user!) - both something of a tech demo for libghostty, and an open source, basic but fully featured terminal emulator. Rex, then, will possibly be a paid product at some point, and adds features like the server, agent integration, and persistent session management on top.

If you had asked me two years ago if I was ready to pay for my terminal and quit my jetbrains subscription, I’d have laughed. Now I’m earnestly ready for that if Superlogical were to announce a paid plan.

Incredible that we’re now at the point of needing to say “without all the negative connotations” when comparing against any sort Google product. LOL. I see this often.

Why on Earth would folks pay for that? I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition.

if it provides a nicer DX and offers value for you, why wouldn't people pay for it?

there's a big market for "makes your life easier" tools both in B2C and B2B

maybe not that big of a market but who knows

It comes down to the question of if it provides enough value over other competing products (which may be free or lower cost) to justify the price. If you sell 10$ widgets that solve $100 problems, you may wonder why nobody is buying your $10 widget when it "provides so much value" and it is because a $1 widget solves the same problem just as well.

Note, I am deliberately using a generic example, I use Ghostty but I haven't tried Rex yet and I have no idea how much value it provides over competing widgets)

yeah, that's true. but I would say with dev tools and such, people might easily fork over $10 if they think it's nice

I'd say the whole "lower cost" thing is less of a problem when it comes to ergonomics, we know that many devs buy all kinds of fancy split keyboards and things like that to make their workflow smoother, so I wouldn't be surprised if people easily forked over money to this

question is if it will actually take off or actually provide/slot into workflows that people actually like etc. if it's heavily opinionated or not really innovative, I don't see how people would "move over"

just my take though.

Absolutely, ergonomics is a huge part of the value- it solves a real problem.

There are many things enterprises will pay for for compliance purposes

[delayed]

Sweet as!

I'm pretty sure he said Rex will remain free.

I'm pretty sure Google Chrome is free ;)

And I’m equally sure chrome isn’t a direct profit driver for Google

Sure, but then again, Superlogical is a company and as such surely will create a commercial product at some point. I would be surprised if that wouldn’t pertain to Rex in some way.

AFAIK he said that Ghostty was like a technical demo of libghostty

a pretty good one

How you got your invite? I wanted to test Rex, but on the website there is only an invite only beta.

I got an invite after only a few weeks

Should be able to add your email to get an invite. My invite arrived after three days.

You don’t need an invite to get a copy of Rex Beta app; the URL to download the official .dmg has been leaked for several days in various Chinese forums. Search “blob.superlogical.com AND latest.dmg” online [1]. And for the people who like Go (golang) projects, someone already asked an LLM to replicate the app in Go [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22blob.superlogical.com%20A...

[2] https://github.com/egoist/gorex

Thank you!

Dang. I was hoping some of this was going to come to ghostty. Especially the ssh session stuff. Wezterm has it. I prefer ghostty but it’s kinda lame if it becomes the lite version of a paid product.

So far they stated they don't intend to charge for Rex.

I like Rex, too. Ghostty was never enough to use as any kind of frequent daily-use thing; I tried it, but found it basic. (I use iTerm, mainly, or Konsole on Linux.)

Rex is a more serious challenger to iTerm, for me, but atm has similar flaws (Mac only, for most functionality) without coming close on a feature basis. (Nobody uses all of iTerm's features, but most iTerm fans use a subset of them that still exceeds what less-featureful terminal apps (i.e., all of them) can do).

But libghostty is fuckig amazing. Do you have some internal/personal bespoke app that needs a terminal pane somewhere? Ask your clanker to use libghostty.

Do you have a professional, commercial product that needs a terminal somewhere? Direct your team of highly-paid experienced human software engineers to evaluate libghostty.

It's the fucking business.