# Ghostel

34 Hacker News commenters recommended Ghostel and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.1 years (4 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Emacs terminal emulator built on libghostty that people find faster and more capable than vterm and eat. Critics note a compiled Zig module that can fail to build.

## Why people recommend it

- Faster than vterm and others (5 comments): "It is very fast, fully compatible, and you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386419)) "Ghostel is noticeably faster when there's a lot of output being dumped" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50263206)) "it is generally much, much better - noticeably faster" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48880917))
- Better than vterm and eat (5 comments): "it has not only replaced vterm/eat but also any other external terminal like kitty/Ghostty" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48881207)) "things that make Ghostel better than vterm especially when working with those cli agents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48592230)) "I've been using it for a bit now, replacing vterm for my setup." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48898331))
- Keeps you inside Emacs (5 comments): "It's really nice that you can click on code references in Codex summaries and open them right there in Emacs buffers." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48882161)) "Ghostel tries to make interaction with the Emacs buffer as seamless as possible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392549)) "consider using ghostel if you want to run it through an emacs terminal" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468267))
- Libghostty-based terminal rendering (3 comments): "which also has the advantage of using libghostty for excellent quality terminal rendering" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48828625)) "Libghostty powers a really popular and powerful terminal emulator for emacs (Ghostel)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50262760)) "awesome, I was looking for a libghostty emacs terminal about a month ago" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435562))

## What people warn about

- Compiled Zig module fails to build (2 comments): "the Zig module failed to compile, with an error message from Zig about a line in the module source" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48904853)) "Downloading a compiled module is a huge negative in the age of supply chain attacks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48887262))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Ghostty](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghostty.md): 401 recommend
- [Termux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/termux.md): 188 recommend
- [iTerm2](https://hackerapproved.com/p/iterm2.md): 95 recommend
- [Warp terminal](https://hackerapproved.com/p/warp-terminal.md): 84 recommend
- [Kitty terminal emulator](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kitty.md): 79 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Ghostel", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghostel/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).