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Ghost in the Shell: a libghostty powered terminal for Emacs

Daniel Kraus (he/him) - IRC: dakra, @dakra@fosstodon.org, daniel@kraus.my

The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sun 2026-12-13. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.

Schedule for SundaySundaySun 9:00- 9:10 Sunday opening remarkssun-openSun 9:10- 9:20 BONE and gnaw.el: tracking what mattersboneSun 9:40- 9:55 Local file history possibilities in EmacslocalSun 10:15-10:30 hutch: code reviews for the mildly disenfranchisedhutchSun 10:40-11:00 Beyond the Chatbot: Team-Oriented AI in EmacsteamSun 11:20-11:40 Beyond shell history: Saving compilation output in EmacscompileSun 1:00- 1:20 DnD and Org Roam: Becoming a Better DM with EmacsdndSun 1:30- 1:50 bible-gateway: A Two-Edged Sword in EmacsbibleSun 2:10- 2:30 Ghost in the Shell: a libghostty powered terminal for EmacsghostelSun 2:50- 3:10 Column-aligning text in EmacsalignSun 3:30- 3:50 Revisiting Emacs Mouse Interactions with AnjuanjuSun 4:00- 4:10 Emacs on Android - Emacs for the next 40 yearsandroidSun 4:30- 4:40 Sunday closing remarkssun-closeSun 10:00-10:21 prefix-tab-groupsprefixSun 10:30-10:50 Emacs as a Window Manager and concurrencyrauSun 11:10-11:30 El-gpu and pix-el: GNU Emacs 2D and 3D game programmingel-gpuSun 1:00- 2:00 [Panel] Emacs, LLMs, and Free SoftwarellmsSun 2:20- 2:40 A (sort of) REPL for learning SVGsvgSun 2:50- 3:00 Org Babel everywherebabelSun 3:20- 3:40 Learning an ancient language with an ancient text editorancientSun 4:00- 4:20 It's Probably Not a Virusvirus9 AM EST10 AM EST11 AM EST12 PM EST1 PM EST2 PM EST3 PM EST4 PM EST5 PM EST

Format: 20-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room https://media.emacsconf.org/2026/current/bbb-ghostel.html
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-ghostel
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Waiting for video from speaker

Times in different time zones:
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~2:10 PM - 2:30 PM EST (US/Eastern)
which is the same as:
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~1:10 PM - 1:30 PM CST (US/Central)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~12:10 PM - 12:30 PM MST (US/Mountain)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~11:10 AM - 11:30 AM PST (US/Pacific)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~7:10 PM - 7:30 PM UTC
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~8:10 PM - 8:30 PM CET (Europe/Paris)
Sunday, Dec 13 2026, ~9:10 PM - 9:30 PM EET (Europe/Athens)
Monday, Dec 14 2026, ~12:40 AM - 1:00 AM IST (Asia/Kolkata)
Monday, Dec 14 2026, ~3:10 AM - 3:30 AM +08 (Asia/Singapore)
Monday, Dec 14 2026, ~4:10 AM - 4:30 AM JST (Asia/Tokyo)
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Description

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: https://github.com/dakra/ghostel

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.

Questions or comments? Please e-mail daniel@kraus.my

Back to the talks Previous by time: bible-gateway: A Two-Edged Sword in Emacs Next by time: A (sort of) REPL for learning SVG Track: General - Watch