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Comment by jdormit | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched from vterm to ghostel, and it is generally much, much better - noticeably faster (e.g. fancy TUI apps that try to refresh the whole terminal every frame actually work), more reliable input handling, and a nicer ELisp API.

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.

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Ghostel co-maintainer here: Understand if you don't have a repro, but if you ever have something actionable we'd love it if you filed an issue, or have the information get to us some other way.

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 also switched from vterm and ghostel is much more responsive for me. Thanks for maintaining it! I use it everyday.

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.

This is a known issue that I've been chasing myself. It most likely has to do with the fact that we cannot render hidden buffers (for reasons) so when the buffer reappears again, we have hooks to refresh it. But sometimes it fails to refresh fully.

When are you mostly seeing this? With agent TUIs?

> 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

Yes, that sounds like the same issue. I’ll update to the latest version and see if it’s resolved. And thanks for your work on this package, it’s been a real game-changer for me!

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