Interview With Mitchell Hashimoto

Mitchell Hashimoto was behind Vagrant, Packer, Consul, Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Waypoint and now builds Ghostty and Vouch.

In this interview, we talk about terminals, Zig and open source.

You’ve been interviewed a lot. Why do people like to interview you?

In interviews, everyone comes from a different angle. Many people want to know how the software engineering to business founder mindset transition went. Then others are interested in product stuff, the work I did at Hashicorp or Ghostty now. What’s different here is there’s no known agenda coming into it; neither of us have anything to sell.

What do you find so fun about terminals? Like, why Ghostty?

I spent ~15 years building CLI applications (not TUIs like we see nowadays). Through that process, I accidentally learned how to color…