Ferroterm
Rust / WebAssembly Terminal Emulator and Library
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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.
HN · launched Jul 5, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 1 view
Niche: terminal emulators and utilities · 106 launches, 1 in the last 7 days ▼ -88% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
More like this: all 106 launches in terminal emulators and utilities →
Could you build this?
No Implementing a high-performance terminal emulator from scratch in Rust targeting WebAssembly requires strict adherence to legacy VT/ANSI escape specifications and custom low-level text rendering.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires a custom state machine to parse the vast VT100/xterm escape sequence specification, an efficient circular buffer memory layout for grid and scrollback data, and a WebGL/WebGPU-based glyph rendering pipeline with custom font atlasing. Outperforming xterm.js by 4x requires deep Rust optimization, zero-copy WASM memory bindings, and specialized systems graphics programming.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 343 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #260 of 344 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 244 days after the earliest competitor.
- VsTerm · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- WAMR3D · ph · 2026-11-13 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- npm · ph · 2026-10-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Codex CLI compiled to WASM running in the browser · hn · 2026-08-19 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- WebTerm · hn · 2026-01-18 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Writing Rust modules for the xv6 kernel · hn · 2025-12-01 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- pureterm · github · 2026-09-16 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Microterm runs Linux VM in any browser tab via WASM, RISCV64 emulation · hn · 2026-02-22 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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