Run Emacs in the Browser with v86
Details
- External ID
- 47465649
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Run Emacs in the Browser with v86
- Website domain
- emacsen.de
- Launched
- March 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1070110701107011
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- desktop utilities and file converters
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- emacs in the browser
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Wrapping the open-source v86 x86 emulator in a web UI is simple, but compiling a customized lightweight Linux/Emacs image and configuring WebAssembly emulation with terminal IO requires specific systems knowledge.
What it would actually take: Uses the `v86` WebAssembly PC emulator embedded inside a web page with Xterm.js or canvas rendering. The challenging part is preparing and stripping a bootable Linux kernel and root filesystem image with Emacs pre-installed to minimize bundle download size, configure virtual terminal serial ports, and handle filesystem persistence via IndexedDB.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 215 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #200 of 216 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 140 days after the earliest competitor.
- M68k assembly emulator that runs in the browser · hn · 2026-03-17 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.69
- Lichess.el · hn · 2026-01-27 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- BrowserCode · hn · 2026-05-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Running Win32/DirectX games in the browser via x86 emulation and WebGPU · hn · 2026-07-14 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- WebTerm · hn · 2026-01-18 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- PDF tools that run in the browser, no upload · hn · 2026-07-22 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Playwriter · hn · 2025-11-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Write, simulate and synthesize VHDL/Verilog in the browser · hn · 2026-07-23 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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.