Hyper – cross-platform terminal built on open web standards

Hyper is a popular open source Electron-based terminal emulator.

The goal of the project is to create a beautiful and extensible experience for command-line interface users, built on open web standards.

Hyper is built on HTML/CSS/JSS. Most of the speed and functionality of Hyper derives from xterm.js, a terminal front-end component written in Java. Previously Hyper was powered by hterm, a sub-project of Chromium.

Key Features

• Highly customizable – customize, share or backup your configuration; there’s a single file to configure the terminal to your specific requirements (.hyper.js).
• High performance Canvas based rendering engine.
• Split windows horizontally and vertically.
• Support for tabs.
• Hot-load and hot-reload plugins.
• Window cascading.
• All command keys can be changed.
• Wide range of themes are available. For example, you can opt for a theme that adapts to the macOS UI, a material theme, themes that are attractive for developers, a tailor-made Pokemon theme, a whimsical theme, or even a solarized theme.
• Foreign keyboard support – type characters such as á, ä.
• Good support for hyperlinks.
• Online catalog of plugins and themes.
• hyper CLI to install plugins and themes with one command (e.g. type ‘hyper i hypercd’ installs the hypercwd).
• Extensions to add functionality. They are universal Node.js modules loaded by both Electron and the renderer process. There’s an excellent range of extensions that are available such as hypercwd which lets you open new tabs with the same directory as the current tab. hyper-search is also another handy extension which offers the ability to search text in the terminal.
• Good internationalization support.
• Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems. Easy installation – there are packages for Debian and Fedora based distributions. And for other distributions, there’s an AppImage.

Website: hyper.is
Support: GitHub code repository
Developer: ZEIT, Inc.
License: MIT License

Hyper is written in TypeScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Related Software

Read our verdict in the software roundup.

Read our verdict in the software roundup.

Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category. This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form.