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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.