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Tiny ruby terminal for X11

7 starsRuby

A pure-Ruby X11 terminal

by vidarh·Jun 15, 2026·9 points·10 comments

AI Analysis

●●●BangerWizardryBig BrainNiche Gem

Pure-Ruby terminal with X11 bindings and font rendering, author uses it daily.

Strengths
  • Zero C extensions means pure Ruby down to X11 protocol handling
  • Damage-driven rendering only redraws changed cells for efficiency
  • Modular engine backend split allows headless testing and reuse
Weaknesses
  • Admittedly slow compared to native terminal emulators
  • Partial escape-code coverage limits full-screen app compatibility
Target Audience

Ruby developers and terminal emulator enthusiasts

Similar To

Alacritty · Kitty · Wezterm

Post Description

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).

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WizardryNiche Gem
ggerman2025
204mo ago