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andyk
ht
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andyk / ht

ht

headless terminal - wrap any binary with a terminal interface for easy programmatic access.

6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
909GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

headless terminal - wrap any binary with a terminal interface for easy programmatic access.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2024-06-02 07:53:14 UTC to 2025-12-03 13:40:39 UTC.

01232024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 commentsJun 20242024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsMar 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsDec 2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jun 20242024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC312
Jul 20242024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20242024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20242024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20242024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20242024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20242024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jan 20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20252025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20252025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20252025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20252025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Jul 20252025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20252025-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20252025-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20252025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20252025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20252025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

6 sources
If you haunt the pull requests of projects you use I bet you'll find there's a new species of PR: > I'm not an expert in this language or this project but I used AI to add a feature and I think its pretty good. Do you want to use it? I find myself writing these and bumping into others doing the same thing. It's exciting, projects that were stagnant are getting new attention. I understand that a maintainer may not want to take responsibility for new features of this sort, but its easier than ever to fork the project and merge them yourself. I noticed this most recently in https://github.com/andyk/ht/pulls which has two open (one draft) PRs of that sort, plus several closed ones. Issues that have been stale for years are getting traction, and if you look at the commit messages, it's AI tooling doing the work. People feel more capable to at
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tempt contributions which they'd otherwise have to wait for a specialist for. We do need to be careful not to overwhelm the specialists with such things, as some of them are of low quality, but on the whole it's a really good thing. If you're not noticing it, I suggests hanging out in places where people actually share code, rather than here where we often instead brag about unshared code.
In IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
alphag33k·Jun 18, 2025Submission

Show HN: ht-mcp – a Rust MCP server of headless terminal for agents

We built a Rust MCP server, which wraps the excellent headless terminal (HT)[1] to makes it available for agentic coding tools. Most agentic coding tools struggle with blocking, interactive terminal tools (all the boilerplate generator, infra CLI tools etc). This is because many existing CLI dev tools are built for humans and require interactive input. We built this so agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Memex, etc) can “see” and “interact” with terminals exactly like humans do. In our demo video [2], you'll see it operating vim/emacs just as a human would - selecting options, navigating menus, and modifying text in real-time. This is crucial for AI coding assistants that need to work with tools designed for human interaction. We originally built an MCP server in TypeScript wrapping the HT (Rust) binary as a proof of concept. It wo
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rked so well that we decided to streamline it and make it more compact and easy to install. In the process, we found that using Rust and the MCP Rust SDK makes it really compelling to build MCP servers, with significant performance improvements: - 40x faster startup time (~50ms vs ~2s) - 70% less memory usage (~15MB vs ~50MB) - Single 3MB binary vs ~200MB Node.js dependencies - No subprocess overhead or external dependencies As Andy put it [4]: "Terminals are one of the oldest and most prolific UI frameworks in all of computing. And they are stateful." Without HT, an agent struggles to manage this state directly; with HT-MCP, an agent can observe and interact with the terminal just like a human does. This is an early first release and we'd love to hear if you find it useful. Here is a demo using it from Claude Code[2] and Memex[3] (our own desktop agent coding tool). Install it via Homebrew: `brew tap memextech/tap && brew install ht-mcp` 1. https://github.com/andyk/ht by Andy Konwinski 2. https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e70a3240-77f5-4ef... 3. https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6a1b6e76-5d5c-4ba... 4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40552257
25 points · Open discussion
This. To add some words why this is important: Given the remote-first container-based world we're heading towards, decoupling UI (terminal emulator) from its "backend" (tmux, code-server) is a great design decision, which I think will ultimately define what the "next generation" of terminal emulators is. Imagine being able to open tabs directly on remote host, reconnect without losing state, etc, all while using native UI (so Cmd+T to open new tab, Cmd+F to search, etc). Productivity game changer, which currently only the iTerm2 users can fully enjoy. Ptyxis (putting its backend in running containers), WezTerm (native handling of ssh sessions) and VSCode's terminal (starting a proprietary code-server binary and connecting to its TCP port) have reached some of this functionality, but in their design they need some out-of-band mechanisms to
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handle the connections, ultimately limiting the scenarios they can handle. Meanwhile tmux -CC [0] and ht [1] are sending both their control channel and data channel over the opened terminal itself (in-band), making them flexible enough to support any configuration. Something complex like `ssh jumpbox -- ssh prod -- podman exec -it prod /bin/bash -- tmux -CC` should just work, as if everything was running on your local machine. [0] https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode [1] https://github.com/andyk/ht
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