Alternatives
Products that do what A pure-Ruby X11 terminal does
I use this as my regular xterm replacement... Why? Because I can. It's pure-Ruby down to the font-renderer, and the X11-bindings. (I also run a Ruby WM, a Ruby editor, file manager, and more, so this is just par for the course of my descent into madness) It supports double-width and double-height text, unicode (but double-width characters may currently be rescaled down), layering fonts, special rendering of box-drawing characters (to ensure they seamlessly scale and connect, and has reasonably complete vt-100/vt-102 emulation. The whole thing is available as a Rubygem and comes with an…
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2015 · github.com
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Tabs, splits, and tmux work fine until you have several projects open with logs, tests, and long-running shells. I kept rebuilding context instead of resuming work. Horizon puts shells on an infinite canvas. You can arrange them into workspaces and reopen later with layout, scrollback, and history intact. Built in 3 days with Claude/Codex, dogfooding the workflow as I went. Feedback and contributions welcome.
Mar 2026 · github.com
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2022 · github.com
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For a year or two I've been building a UI library with the aim of making desktop applications fun and easy to write. It is currently written in C/Ruby and uses a custom tree sitter grammar to describe templates. Features include: composable UI components, template directives, event and prop handling, slots, styles and automation capabilities baked in. One of the goals of the project is privileging easy to write custom components via a drawing API over providing a fixed set of components. At the time of this writing it should install on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but sometimes it is hard…
2025 · codeberg.org
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I've been working on an ANSI art editor off and on for a while. It works like a traditional ANSI text editor, except it supports 256 colors, Unicode and CP437 encoding, frame-based animation, custom UI themes, terminal mouse input, HTML and IRC color output, and runs in Utf-8 terminals. It's written in Python and curses, and is fairly portable across Unix systems. If you have ever used TheDraw or Aciddraw, the user interface is similar. It can also load/convert, view, edit and save most CP437 (MS-DOS style) ANSI art in a Utf-8 terminal, so you can view ANSI artscene packs in the comfort…
2024 · github.com
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2024 · github.com
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Whereas this is mostly a terminal eye-candy project to get you street cred, it does have some serious aspects. Firstly it solves the age-old problem of low-contrast text, like when you `ls` a broken symlink and the red background colour is too near your current theme's foreground colour. Tattoy solves this by using none other than the web's WCAG 2.1 contrast algorithm for accessible text. Secondly, an explicit design goal is that Tattoy should be able to polyfill new terminal protocols, the `xwayland` of the TTY if you will. Say if we want to experiment with completely deprecating ANSI…
2025 · tattoy.sh
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2019 · github.com
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2021 · repl.leaningtech.com
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> "In a world without nil safety, one gem dares to ask: 'What if we just guessed?'"
Oct 2025 · github.com
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2024 · webdraft.hu
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Hello, everyone. I built Unicorn: an embeddable MISRA C:2012 implementation of essential Unicode Algorithms. Unicorn is designed to be fully customizable: you can select which Unicode algorithms and character properties are included or excluded from compilation. You can also exclude Unicode character blocks wholesale for scripts your application does not support. It's perfect for resource constrained devices like microcontrollers and IoT devices. About me: I quit my Big Corp job a few years back to pursue my passion for software development and this is one of my first commercial releases.
2024 · railgunlabs.com
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Hello HN! Just wanted to share a small project I've been working for the last few months. It's a tool called Runal, a text-based creative coding environment that runs in the terminal. It works similarly as processing or p5js but it does all the rendering as text. And it can either be scripted with JavaScript or used as a Go package. It's open-source and cross-platform (linux, macOS, windows). It seems to me that text/ascii-art aesthetics are really popular in creative coding communities, so I though it would make sense to create a tool that runs on a platform which can render text only.…
2025 · github.com
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Jun 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN, this is a small Haskell learning project that I wanted to share. It's just a website where you can see how many people write the exact same text as you (thought it was a fun idea). It's built using Scotty, SQLite, Redis and Caddy. Currently it's running in a small DigitalOcean droplet (1 Gb RAM). Using Haskell for web development (specifically with Scotty) was slightly easier than I thought, but still a relatively hard task compared to other languages. One of my main friction points was Haskell's multiple string-like types: String, Text (& lazy), ByteString (& lazy), and each library…
Jan 2026 · subth.ink
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FerroTerm is a Terminal Emulator (xterm/vt100) / Library witten in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. It is approx 4x faster than xterm.js which is used by VSCode etc. and prodvides wide spec coverage. https://datanoisetv.github.io/ferroterm/ Would love some feedback and hear what people want to build with it.
Jul 2026
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Hello internet folks! I'm happy to share the first TestFlight release of Glyph3D, a 3D text visualizer for macOS and iOS. It's free, supports pretty much any utf8 data, and is a pretty interesting way to navigate your repositories or data directories without the limitations of standard text windows! Download and bookmark for macOS and iOS: https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat/ - You should be able to download public repos from GitHub and render them. - Play with opening and closing windows. I've disabled many of the in-flight features to keep user confusion down,…
2024 · github.com
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It's based on the jediterm library developed for IDEs, but it can also be put to work as a standalone terminal emulator with tabs. The library has been around for more than 10 years, but I don't think anyone made a terminal emulator app from it?
2025 · github.com
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So, after years of abandoning Rust after the hello world stage, I finally decided to do something substantial. It started with simple line rendering, but I liked how it was progressing so I figured I could make a reasonably complete PSX style renderer and a game with it. My only dependency is SDL2; I treat it as my "platform", so it handles windowing, input and audio. This means my Cargo.toml is as simple as: [dependencies.sdl2] version = "0.35" default-features = false features = ["mixer"] this pulls around 6-7 other dependencies. I am doing actual true color 3D rendering (with Z buffer,…
Sep 2025 · totenarctanz.itch.io
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