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xtermjs
xterm.js
TypeScript2016–2026
xtermjs / xterm.js

xterm.js

A terminal for the web

Command LineWeb DevelopmentGames & EmulationNetworking
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
21Distinct people
35Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
21.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A terminal for the web

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

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

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:03:30 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 year35 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-02-09 13:17:25 UTC to 2026-10-27 18:26:18 UTC.

0123452016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

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
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404

What Hacker News says

4 sources
Tyriar·May 12, 2021
I wrote the terminal canvas renderers in VS Code that has been called out a few times here. Initially I implemented a canvas renderer using just a 2d context to draw many textures which sped things up "5 to 45 times"[1] over the older DOM renderer. Since then I moved onto a WebGL renderer[2] which was mostly a personal project, it's basically the first canvas renderer but better in every way since it works by organizing a typed array (very fast) and sending it to the GPU in one go, as opposed to piece meal and having the browser do its best to optimize/reduce calls. This was measured to improve performance by up to 900% in some cases over the canvas renderer, but actually much more than that if for example the browser has GPU rendering disabled and tried to user the canvas renderer on the CPU. My opinion here is that canvas is a great tec
Read the rest
hnology, capable of speeding things up significantly and getting close to native app performance. It comes with very real trade offs though: - Cost of implementation and maintenance is much higher with canvas. This is particularly the case with WebGL, there have been very few contributions to xterm.js (the terminal frontend component) in the WebGL renderer because of the knowledge required. - Accessibility needs to be implemented from scratch using a parallel DOM structure that only gets exposed to the screen reader. Supporting screen readers will probably also negate the benefits of using canvas to begin with since you need to maintain the DOM structure anyway (the Accessibility Object Model DOM API should help here). - Plugins/extensibility for webapps are still very possible but requires extra thinking and explicit APIs. For xterm.js we're hoping to allow decorating cells in the terminal by giving embedders DOM elements that are managed/positioned by the library[3]. More recently I built an extension for VS Code called Luna Paint[4] which is an image editor built on WebGL, taking the lessons I learned from working on the terminal canvas renderer to make a surprisingly capable image editor embedded in a VS Code webview. [1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend... [2]: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_55#_webgl-renderer-... [3]: https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/issues/1852 [4]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Tyriar.l...
In Google Docs will now use canvas based rendering

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