{"slug": "show-hn-a-pure-ruby-x11-terminal", "title": "Show HN: A pure-Ruby X11 terminal", "summary": "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.", "body_md": "I use this as my regular xterm replacement... Why? Because I can.\n\nIt's pure-Ruby down to the font-renderer, and the X11-bindings.\n\n(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)\n\nIt 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).\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545068)\n\nPoints: 2\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-pure-ruby-x11-terminal", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/vidarh/rubyterm", "published_at": "2026-06-15 18:15:57+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-15 18:38:43.633813+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools"], "entities": ["Claude"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-pure-ruby-x11-terminal", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-pure-ruby-x11-terminal.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-pure-ruby-x11-terminal.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-a-pure-ruby-x11-terminal.jsonld"}}