Xterm.js 1.0

Today we are excited to announce the availability of xterm.js 1.0! Xterm.js is the open source terminal component that lies behind SourceLair’s terminal since 2014.

Great features

Xterm.js is a fully featured terminal emulator based on VT100 terminal with lots of amazing features, the most important of which are listed below:

  • Full support for text-based applications (e.g. ls, git, etc.)
  • Full support for curses-based applications (e.g. vim, tmux, etc.)
  • Mouse event support for terminal applications
  • International character support, including CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters
  • Modular API that supports add-ons

Products built with xterm.js

Besides SourceLair, xterm.js is being used as the terminal component for a few wonderful applications like the following.

Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Since June 2016 the integrated terminal of Microsoft Visual Studio Code is based on xterm.js. Visual Studio Code is a free and open source code editor by Microsoft, which is built completely on web technologies and is already used by millions of developers world wide. We are really proud to mention that we have worked a lot with Microsoft and more particularly with Daniel Imms on improving xterm.js. We have received great stellar Pull Requests from them which makes Microsoft our biggest external contributor of xterm.js to date.

Jupyter Notebook

Since May 2016 the terminal of Jupyter Notebook’s JavaScript UI is powered by xterm.js. The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text, which is also very popular in the Python community. We are excited that Jupyter uses xterm.js and really grateful for the contributions we received from its team.

GitLab

GitLab ported xterm.js to CoffeeScript to improve its terminal emulation. GitLab is free and open source software that provides Git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis.

Download xterm.js

Xterm.js 1.0 is available for download at npm, bower.io and GitHub.

Open Source

As mentioned before xterm.js is an open source project and has received tons of valuable contributions from external contributors as well. We would love to receive your contributions also! If you would like to contribute the corresponding section of xterm.js’ README file is the best place to start!

If you are developing an application that could use a terminal (or terminal emulation), then xterm.js is for you. Feel free to visit xterm.js on GitHub and ask any question about it or for some help in integrating it into your application.

Want to learn more about what xterm.js is capable of? Go to www.sourcelair.com, create a project (or open an existing one) to test all of its features thoroughly in your project’s fully featured Linux terminal.

Where you can get

Updates and contact us

You can check out product updates at the SourceLair blog, or learn more about us at State of Progress, where we share our thoughts on software development and management.

Stay in touch

You can reach out to us at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or email us at [email protected].