[[!meta title="Ghost in the Shell: a libghostty powered terminal for Emacs"]] [[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2026 Daniel Kraus"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/ghostel-nav)" raw="yes"]] # Ghost in the Shell: a libghostty powered terminal for Emacs Daniel Kraus (he/him) - IRC: dakra, @dakra@fosstodon.org, [[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/ghostel-before)" raw="yes"]] Ghostel is a terminal emulator built on libghostty-vt, the VT engine behind the Ghostty terminal. This talk gives an overview of the features Ghostel and its extensions provide. I briefly cover what Emacs offers out of the box (term, shell) and the existing alternatives (vterm, eat), and explain why a new terminal emulator for Emacs is still needed. Most of the talk is demos. Some show what the libghostty engine makes possible, others what Emacs Lisp integration makes possible. An external terminal can give you the first but not the second. The terminals inside Emacs give you the second but not the first. Ghostel is the only one where you get both in the same buffer. To try it yourself you can install Ghostel from melpa or from GitHub: About the speaker: Daniel Kraus discovered Emacs over 25 years ago and is the author of numerous Emacs packages and other free software. Professionally he works with Python, Java and TypeScript, but privately he favors Lisps, mainly Clojure and Elisp. In this talk he introduces Ghostel, a terminal emulator for Emacs built on the VT engine from Ghostty, and demos what it makes possible that no other terminal can. [[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/ghostel-after)" raw="yes"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/ghostel-nav)" raw="yes"]]