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Discussion (25 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
> is there something Ghostel is missing
eshell allows me to manipulate text as I would in any other Emacs buffer. If I have a function which wraps a word in quotes, and bind it to a key, I can be confident it will work in eshell like it does anywhere else. It's a real killer feature. If I use evil-mode, or xah-fly-keys, or simply want to use ispell to correct the spelling of a word, it all works.
Unfortunately with Ghostel none of this works. It's not integrated in the same way. There are extensions like evil-ghostel-mode, but they are limited.
Are there any plans to improve this, or is it a limitation Ghostel has to live with?
A Ghostel equivalent of eat-eshell-mode would be amazing.
There you could type on the prompt line and then call jinx or your quote wrapping function etc as it's just a normal Emacs buffer. You can't edit the scrollback buffer though, but I don't think that's possible in eshell either.
But line-mode has it's own set of problems. Since we don't send anything to the shell, you could have some problems with autocomplete or similar things that change the text depending on each typed char. Similarly we automatically disable line-mode when you enter a TUI (alt-screen) app, as line-mode doesn't make too much sense in e.g. vim. But that's configurable and you can still force line-mode, it really depends on the TUI apps.
We try to support as much as possible and work around things like fish autocomplete etc. But please try and report any issues you find.
I have opened right now about a dozen Ghostty windows and about 20 tabs in each window, i.e. more than 100 shell instances.
I have started in as many of them as I could, before becoming too bored, a "ls -lR" on a file system with many millions of files.
I could not see any problem, much less any crash. I have been using Ghostty for a few months, very intensively, all day long, and I have not seen any crash or other suspicious behavior.
If you have seen a crash, perhaps there was either some specific version of Ghosstty that had a bug, or, more likely, some weird interaction with some other software that you have, and which might be buggy, e.g. the GPU driver. (I am using an NVIDIA GPU.)
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.
The junk at the top of the screen sounds like it could be https://github.com/dakra/ghostel/issues/495 and it should be fixed on later versions. But maybe you're seeing another bug. The tricky part is replicating the libghostty-vt internal data into an Emacs buffer while only replacing the parts that need to be replaced. We have property based tests to exercise this a lot, but sometimes things slip through.
The latest released version as I'm writing this should have improved lifecycle handling, so maybe it also fixes some of your issues.
As you say, the project is still in the early phase so hopefully, we can iron things out over time.
I do see a similar issue, where when I switch to the ghostel buffer and it wasn’t visible before, the text is scrambled. I’ll check if I can find a way to reliably reproduce it.
When are you mostly seeing this? With agent TUIs?
Why? Keep it a part of distribution.
That means we would have to check in the module binary for all platforms (>10MB together) if we want that it comes with the distribution.
Also looking at e.g. jinx, another popular package that uses Emacs native modules, it does it like vterm and offers to compile on first usage.
So as a Emacs package author, for a user friendly installation you can realistically only offer to download or compile on first use.