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Show HN: A pure-Ruby X11 terminal

A developer released a pure-Ruby X11 terminal as their regular xterm replacement, featuring double-width/double-height text, Unicode support, and vt-100/vt-102 emulation. The terminal is available as a Rubygem and includes an ANSI text backend, with recent bug fixes assisted by Claude.

read1 min views1 publishedJun 15, 2026

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 ANSI text backend, so you can run your terminal in your terminal. The bulk was written manually, but the last few days I had Claude write a test harness to shake out a bunch of bugs, and start refactoring and cleaning up the code base (it's still full of warts).

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545068)

Points: 2

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