Gridland: make terminal apps that also run in the browser
Details
- External ID
- 47505731
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Gridland: make terminal apps that also run in the browser
- Website domain
- gridland.io
- Launched
- March 24, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 111
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9175891758917589
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi everyone,Gridland is a runtime + ShadCN UI registry that makes it possible to build terminal apps that run in the browser as well as the native terminal. This is useful for demoing TUIs so that users know what they're getting before they are invested enough to install them. And, tbh, it's also just super fun!Gridland is the successor to Ink Web (ink-web.dev) which is the same concept, but using Ink + xterm.js. After building Ink Web, we continued experimenting and found that using OpenTUI and a canvas renderer performed better with less flickering and nearly instant load times.We're excited to continue iterating on this. I expect a lot of criticism from the "why does this need to exist" angle, and tbh, it probably doesn't - it's really mostly just for fun, but we still think the demo use case mentioned previously has potential.- Chris + Jess
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- build terminal apps that run in browser
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Creating a React-like component library is standard, but building a dual-target runtime that renders interchangeably to ANSI escape sequences in native terminals and to a browser-based canvas/xterm terminal emulator requires intricate terminal emulation knowledge.
What it would actually take: The architecture involves an abstract virtual DOM reconciler targeting both OpenTUI/ncurses terminal output and a WebAssembly/xterm.js canvas in the browser. The hard parts are building the layout engine (often a custom flexbox port like Yoga to character grids), handling ANSI escape parsing, raw keyboard input events across environments, and ensuring identical UI rendering fidelity between web and terminal.
Discussion
14 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: xterm.js, Ink Web, Ghostty Web, xterm
Concerns raised: Page load time (2-3s for Ink Web vs near instant needed), Canvas flickering issues, Node/Bun specific imports not compatible with browser, File system access limitations in browser runtime
Feature requests: WebSocket support for real-time features (live chat, presence indicators), OpenTUI Core compatibility for embedding actual apps, File system abstraction (isomorphic solutions)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 88 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #12 of 89 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 123 days after the earliest competitor.
- Giggles · hn · 2026-03-03 · 23 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Go-TUI · hn · 2026-03-06 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- TempleOS Playground · hn · 2026-01-24 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Firefox in WebAssembly · hn · 2026-07-15 · 273 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Horizon · hn · 2026-03-17 · 84 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Titan · hn · 2025-12-11 · 49 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the Terminal · hn · 2026-07-13 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Node.JS in the Browser · hn · 2026-08-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.