Ghostel.el: Terminal emulator powered by libghostty

Hi! Maintainer of Ghostel here.

baokaola and I actually wanted to do a "Show HN" next week, but looks like someone was faster submitting the link.

Have a look at the GitHub repo which is a bit nicer for a quick overview: https://github.com/dakra/ghostel

To add some context, Ghostel is a terminal emulator for Emacs powered by libghostty-vt.

There's a feature comparison vs vterm and eat: https://dakra.github.io/ghostel/#ghostel-vs-vterm

And here is a gist with images to compare performance and correctness: https://gist.github.com/dakra/4a0b76ebcf5d52338e134864378465...

But for me personally, it has not only replaced vterm/eat but also any other external terminal like kitty/Ghostty.

Having your terminal text just like a normal Emacs buffer opens up so many possibilities and extension points that are just not available on any other terminal.

Even simple stuff like searching in the scrollback, then navigating and selecting+copying a paragraph only with the keyboard. For every Emacs user that's so natural and fast in Ghostel while often cumbersome in other Terminals where I just reach to the mouse because it's easier.

Happy to answer any questions and also like to hear feedback positive or negative.

If you're an Emacs user and tried Ghostel and are still using Ghostty (or another external Terminal), is there something Ghostel is missing or is it just because you want some processes to run outside of Emacs?

baokaola and I are also very active on GitHub, so feel free to open an issue if you have any.

I think the title should mention Emacs somewhere. A terminal emulator is different than a terminal emulator for Emacs.

I recently switched from vterm to ghostel, and it is generally much, much better - noticeably faster (e.g. fancy TUI apps that try to refresh the whole terminal every frame actually work), more reliable input handling, and a nicer ELisp API.

That being said, there are still some rough edges. Sometimes it fails to properly clear the terminal, leaving junk at the top of the buffer before the currrent prompt line. And on a couple of occasions it has totally frozen, with no fix other than killing the buffer and starting over.

Overall, it’s very promising and totally usable as a daily driver, but it needs a bit of polish and bug fixes before I would consider it mature.

Been using it for bit over a month now. It's really nice that you can click on code references in Codex summaries and open them right there in Emacs buffers.

Ghostty has crashed nightly for me with ~10 terminals open across a few windows. So, I haven't been able to run it nor would I want to embed it inside anything I daily drive.

I came across this the other day and it's come close to helping me make the switch to emacs.

I've been de-IDEing myself lately for a variety of reasons. I've been trying to figure out if my future is tmux + neovim or emacs.

I got setup most of the way with vanilla neovim and customizing to my liking pretty easy.

I like the ideas of emacs and there are things that are compelling, but oh man it feels imprenetable, especially with how easy I was able to get up and running with neovim.

This is working great, it plus the Claude code integration has really adjusted how much I use Emacs. It's become a bit of a hub for me now.

Question: if I don't use TUIs or millions of lines of scrolling text, what am I missing by not using these newer terminal implementations? I use mintty on Windows and am pretty happy with it.

> The native module is a prebuilt binary that auto-downloads on first use

Why? Keep it a part of distribution.

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