Being a co-maintainer, I'm a bit biased, but I think you should try Ghostel (https://github.com/dakra/ghostel) if you aren't already. And if you are, you should report bugs so we can fix them :)
Otherwise, I think the main advantage over Vterm and other Emacs terminal emulators is that it handles modern fancy TUIs a lot better than Vterm. It's backed by libghostty-vt so supports all the new fangled escape codes. It has a bunch of tricks to force fallback glyphs to the terminal monospace grid to remove the flickering effect when the glyph cells change size during TUI animations, most notably in Claude Code. Btop and Yazi runs great too, if you're into that sort of thing.
Plus a bunch of other things!
https://lawsofux.com/postels-law/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
>In computing, the robustness principle is a design guideline for software that states: "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". It is often reworded as: "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept". The principle is also known as Postel's law, after Jon Postel, who used the wording in an early specification of TCP.[1]
>In other words, programs that send messages to other machines (or to other programs on the same machine) should conform completely to the specifications, but programs that receive messages should accept non-conformant input as long as the meaning is clear.
I thought it was named Ghostel because of Ghostty and EL (emacs lisp).
Of course. Emacs has been my stable editor over many years, handling many languages that came along, surviving many other IDEs that came and gone (the latest being the Cursor sold out).
There're always new enhancements in Emacs, from multiple-cursor editing years ago, to LSP and tree sitter in recent years. Currently I just got into the vertico/marginalia/consult/embark combo packages. Embark with its context based actions seriously is an amazing underrated package.
1.Memorizing how to use it has a big learning curve.
2.Wrist pain from pressing button combinations all the time.
Otherwise plenty of people still use it and it's great. Just hard to pick up for new users.
UniPress[1] Emacs's vi emulation mode would actually flip you over to an emacs shell buffer when you typed :q, and the shell would recognize when you typed "vi foo.c" and flip back over to a vi emulator buffer instead of actually running vi, but INSTANTLY, since changing buffers in a running emacs was much faster than actually starting up a new vi process.
So die-hard vi users didn't have to re-learn their muscle memory, and could just stay in the same emacs all the time, while the same old emacs alternately flipped between pretending to be a shell, and pretending to be vi.
[1] "Evil Software Hoarder Emacs": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
I used have a ep which I could pipe something into and it would put it in Emacs buffer but that stopped working somewhere I never got around to fixing it.
Yes. I use it instead of tmux for that.
For my desktops, I use an Ergodox EZ keyboard and mapped ctrl and meta into the thumb clusters there.
Also claude-code-ide.el. try these
I've been trying to use agent-shell with OpenCode but the abstraction that agent-shell puts on top of it is too much. I can't figure out how to change the model. The command to do it doesn't do anything; I see the correct model list and seem to be able to select it, but then it doesn't change. If I just run "opencode" in the same directory it comes up configured the way I want. The Claude integration works with that workflow too. Opencode comes up with some baby CPU-only model that I've never heard of, and basically, it outputs syntactically correct English sentences but doesn't seem to do much more than that.
Since I mostly use Claude I haven't fussed with agent-shell much yet.