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xtermjs/xterm.js

📈 Trending★ 20,436TypeScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5ActiveLicenseSetup · easy

TLDR

A TypeScript library that embeds a fully functional terminal emulator in web browsers, letting developers add real terminal access to web apps.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((xterm.js))
    What it does
      Terminal in browser
      Real shell access
      Works with bash vim tmux
    Key features
      GPU-accelerated renderer
      Unicode and emoji support
      Mouse and accessibility
      Addon system
    Use cases
      Web-based IDEs
      Remote terminals
      Terminal dashboards
    Tech stack
      TypeScript
      WebGL optional
      Node.js headless mode
    Audience
      Web developers
      DevOps tools
      IDE builders

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Build a web-based IDE or code editor with an embedded terminal for running commands.

USE CASE 2

Create a remote terminal dashboard that lets users SSH into servers and run shell commands from a browser.

USE CASE 3

Add a terminal panel to a DevOps or monitoring tool so users can execute scripts without leaving the web app.

USE CASE 4

Build a terminal-based game or interactive tutorial that runs entirely in the browser.

Tech stack

TypeScriptJavaScriptWebGLNode.jsWebSocket

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min
Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you keep the copyright notice.

In plain English

Xterm.js is a building-block component for web developers that puts a fully working terminal, the kind of black, blinking-cursor command-line window you see on a computer, inside a web page. It powers the integrated terminal in VS Code and its forks, and standalone apps like Tabby and Hyper. Xterm.js is not a terminal app you download, and it is not bash. It is a front-end widget that draws the terminal screen and handles keyboard input; you connect it to a real shell (such as bash) through a separate library like node-pty. Keystrokes flow from the browser into the shell, and the shell's output is streamed back and rendered. It works with most terminal applications, including curses-based ones like vim and tmux, and supports mouse events. It has rich Unicode support (CJK, emojis, IMEs), an optional GPU-accelerated renderer, screen-reader and contrast settings, configurable theming and custom glyphs, and a documented API. Extra functionality lives in optional addons you install separately: fitting the terminal to its container, attaching to a remote process over WebSocket, clipboard access, search, image rendering, font ligatures, web-link detection, a WebGL renderer, serializing the buffer to VT escape sequences or HTML, and Unicode helpers. You would use xterm.js if you are building anything in the browser that needs a real terminal, a cloud IDE, an SSH client, a browser-based admin console, or an Electron desktop app. It is written in TypeScript with zero runtime dependencies in the core, distributed on npm as @xterm/xterm, and a headless build (@xterm/headless) is also available for Node.js. Supported browsers are the latest Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to set up xterm.js in a React app and connect it to a Node.js backend using WebSocket to relay terminal input and output.
Prompt 2
How do I enable GPU acceleration in xterm.js and what performance improvements should I expect?
Prompt 3
I want to add search and copy-to-clipboard functionality to an xterm.js terminal. Which addons do I need and how do I install them?
Prompt 4
How do I make xterm.js fit responsively to its container and handle window resizing?
Prompt 5
Show me an example of using @xterm/headless to run a terminal in Node.js without a browser.
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Generated 2026-05-21 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.