Since 1985, Emacs has outlived the mainframe era, the desktop era, and modern IDEs. Its secret? It was never just a text editor—it's an endlessly malleable Lisp machine in disguise. It is hidden on most Linux and Mac computers.

I've never counted my token burn, but my Fable mule accounts burn 2% of my session limits per minute. I have a bunch of Emacs macros to help me switch accounts because when I get to about 95% on the session, I only have seconds left to get logged into a new mule. What a mess.

libghostty 1.0 is here! I started Ghostty ~5yrs ago to work towards this. Today, libghostty is in hundreds of projects used by tens of millions of people. 1.0 marks ABI stability, quality, and an invite for distros to begin packaging. Since starting the Ghostty project in 2022, the most common question I've been asked is "why?". Today, I'll answer this by showing the broad industry impact libghostty has already had. On top of JetBrains and Neovim already mentioned (that alone being over 10 million users): -KDE developers are experimenting with a Konsole replacement built on it. - Vercel's Turborepo uses it to render task output in its TUI. - devenv uses it to drive shells. - Antithesis used it to fuzz TUI programs and found real bugs in btop and others. -Ghostel brings it to Emacs. - ghostty-web is the WASM build with an Xterm.js-compatible API. - Commercial products like OrbStack embed it. - And a whole wave of new terminals and "agentic" coding tools, such as herdr and cmux, have been built on it rather than writing yet another emulator. There are community bindings for Rust, Go, JavaScript, Swift, Python, .NET, Elixir, Dart, Java, and more, and the awesome-libghostty list tracks well over a hundred projects. More people today use a terminal powered by libghostty than use Ghostty the application, by a very large multiple. And libghostty is having a much larger impact than being "just" a terminal emulator. I'm excited to see where people take it from here.

I deleted my Superlogical tweet because I'm a dumbass, so here we go again. I've used it even more since the last post. @Superlogical's Rex will take the world by storm next year. I got into the alpha. It's insanely fast, very easy to use, and it solves a problem I didn't realize even had a solution: agents going through five to six layers of terminals and shells. For me, Rex replaces three layers of ancient terminal emulation with a lightning-fast, modern terminal emulator that can replace ssh/mosh, ghostty, and tmux, eliminating the jank I see in my current stack. I run Emacs with 20+ agents and it drives terminals about as hard as you can, and in Rex it feels almost local from a hotel across the U.S. This is serious software for serious users, and has all the hallmarks of the quality we always saw from HashiCorp.

OK legit question for the AI-pilled, since there's no info on this anywhere. What are y'all mfs using for an agentic IDE, meaning, to multiplex 10-20 or more agents? Superlogical? Herdr? github/bb? Something else? I use Emacs, and I wouldn't wish it on you. But I want *something* good to recommend. What do people use?

Libghostty progress in the past 6 months. It's amazing that NOTHING IN THIS LIST was true 6 months ago, and now its ALL VERY REAL. I remember bringing up the idea of libghostty 4 years ago and most people saying "but why." I did it anyways. And here we are! Text reproduced in case its easier to read this way: As a reminder, libghostty is the highly portable, embeddable library that provides core terminal emulation, render state, and more. I always felt that a free, high qualty, lightweight, reusable terminal emulation core would benefit the developer world more than any single GUI application. And that is playing out! It is and always was my true purpose with the Ghostty project (I said this in my first ever talk about Ghostty!). I've jokingly said many times that Ghostty GUI is just a glorified tech demo for libghostty. That's not fair though, because GUI is great and there are really talented people working on it. Since I started the project, Ghostty has always gotten people saying "I don't understand why you'd start a terminal emulator today." Well, the answer is libghostty. It's truly unique and its enabling something special (imo!). Highlights of libghostty since 6 months ago (none of the below was true 6 months ago): - Libghostty has nearly 100% coverage of all of Ghostty's core (and you can compile with flags to remove any of these features for size/safety): - Libghostty now builds and is tested (in CI) for: Apple (macOS, iOS, visionOS), Windows (MSVC and GNU), Linux, FreeBSD, Android, WebAssembly, and freestanding (i.e. direct on hardware with no OS). - Libghostty has bindings in pretty much every popular programming language: C, Zig, Go, Swift, Python, Rust, .NET, etc. - Libghostty's memory requirements have dramatically shrunk to enable the portability above. There's still work to do but a single empty terminal now takes 90% less memory. And at scale I've proven 10,000 active (input/output happening) terminals on a Linux server with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM. - Libghostty powers all JetBrains IDE terminals, over 12.5 million active users. - Libghostty is the most popular core behind the wave of venture-backed "agentic" terminals and editors, such as Herdr, cmux, and many others. - Libghostty is being discussed and has been verbally accepted to replace the terminal core in Neovim: (work still to be done) - Libghostty powers a really popular and powerful terminal emulator for emacs (Ghostel): - Libghostty's speed is used by Antithesis to fuzz popular terminal programs and has directly led to hundreds of bug fixes sent upstream to programs such as tmux, btop, shells, and other terminal emulators. :) - And so much more: Libghostty is really successfully turning into the tide that raises all boats. As it becomes more popular, Ghostty itself gets more performant and stable, and so does everyone else. It is also a vehicle for delivering modern terminal emulation to the widest source possible. I plan on tagging libghostty 1.0 in the next few months and declaring ABI stability at that point!