Similar story here (user since early 90s). I wish more AI harnesses could also have a dumb-terminal mode in addition to the fully non-interactove mode, so they could all stay naturally searchable/copyable in simple comint buffers. Even the best current terminal emulators within Emacs are not great to recursively handle Emacs (or modern AI TUI) well enough, so I occasionally also use a shell putside Emacs.
Ghostel is fantastic for this. It is very fast, fully compatible, and you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t. With ace-jump this makes for very efficient copying.
Since I started using Ghostel, my Claude Code and Codex sessions started gradually migrating into Emacs. They work just as well as in a terminal and managing them is more convenient. This is also why I can't really find any use for all those newfangled tools that are intended to help with managing multiple coding sessions.
> you can quickly enter a copy-paste mode with C-c C-t. With ace-jump this makes for very efficient copying.
You probably know this already, Ghostel tries to make interaction with the Emacs buffer as seamless as possible (obviously all configurable).
Of course there's line-mode where everything is just a normal buffer, like a better M-x shell replacement.
And in semi-char-mode there's a lot of config options that automatically toggle copy-mode when it makes sense, e.g. isearch, consult-line, etc.
avy needs some extra config, see https://dakra.github.io/ghostel/#mouse-selection
then you can just use avy like normal and after the jump you're automatically in copy- (or emacs-)mode and when done copying, you're automatically back to the live terminal input.
Thanks! Agreed ghostel looks fantastic. I still wish there was an in between a full TUI and a full non-interactive version, but switching to ghostel means I can fully live within emacs again.
Have you tried Ghostel for this? I'm one of the Ghostel maintainers so if you have any particular harness that behaves poorly in Ghostel we'd like to know about it so we can fix it.
Thanks so much for your work. I moved to emacs to have a better integration between cli and the editor I am using and ghostel is a tremendous improvement over vterm.
Thanks! I hadn't tried it. I've started using it today; I limited a couple options about dired-local and images in kitty due to concerns from upstream security audits, but otherwise looks fantastic.
