Ghostel.el: Terminal emulator powered by libghostty
Ghostel is a new terminal emulator for Emacs built on the libghostty-vt engine, offering advanced features like Kitty keyboard protocols and synchronized output. It is designed to replace older emulators by providing a more modern and feature-rich terminal experience.
Why it matters
It represents an advancement in developer tooling, specifically for users of the Emacs text editor who require high-performance terminal integration.
Ghostel is an Emacs terminal emulator powered by libghostty-vt - the same VT engine that drives the Ghostty terminal. A native dynamic module written in Zig handles terminal state, rendering, and local PTY I/O; Elisp manages keymaps, buffers, commands, and remote process integration.
Ghostel is inspired by emacs-libvterm and follows the same two-layer design, but uses Ghostty's modern VT engine instead of libvterm. This brings the Kitty keyboard and graphics protocols, rich underline styles, OSC 8 hyperlinks, OSC 4/10/11 color queries, and synchronized output (DEC 2026) - none of which libvterm supports. See Ghostel vs vterm and eat for a detailed comparison.
The native module is downloaded automatically on first use, so no toolchain is required for the common case. Open a terminal with M-x ghostel .
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