Hacker News: kylecarbs

New comment by kylecarbs in "Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty"

kylecarbs — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:36:11 +0000

This is the exact use-case Boo is made for!

New comment by kylecarbs in "Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty"

kylecarbs — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:11:08 +0000

Apologies, half of this indeed was. As I was iterating on the README this seemed apt, but I will refrain!

New comment by kylecarbs in "Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty"

kylecarbs — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:50:53 +0000

Cmux is a standalone terminal. Boo is a command-line similar to screen, backed by libghostty for terminal emulation.

New comment by kylecarbs in "Show HN: Boo – screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty"

kylecarbs — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:10:45 +0000

Just published v0.5.13 which should fix this! It seems to be a path issue. Now boo falls back to tmpdir for storing sockets.

New comment by kylecarbs in "Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty"

kylecarbs — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:36:24 +0000

I want boo to be a screen replacement, not a tmux replacement. tmux gives you a whole workspace: layout, scrollback, copy mode, a status bar. screen's appeal was that it did almost none of that: sessions, a prefix key, done. boo keeps that model and swaps the emulation for libghostty so reattach actually redraws correctly.

They also compose: a boo session is just a PTY running a program, so you can run tmux inside one if you want.

New comment by kylecarbs in "Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty"

kylecarbs — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:32:12 +0000

I'll take a look at this now. Thanks for reporting!

New comment by kylecarbs in "Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty"

kylecarbs — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:03:35 +0000

Fair. Adding a section for this now.

screen actually works the same way architecturally: it parses all output through its own built-in terminal emulator and redraws from that state on reattach. But that emulator is decades old and lags far behind what modern programs emit. Whatever it doesn't understand gets dropped or mangled on redraw. boo swaps that layer for libghostty-vt, Ghostty's VT core, so the saved state matches what your terminal would actually display, and terminal queries get answered while detached so TUIs don't hang unattended.

tmux is great, it was just never the model I wanted. I really liked screen's simplicity, sessions and a prefix key and nothing else to learn, and boo keeps exactly that.

Show HN: Boo – Screen-style terminal multiplexer built on libghostty

kylecarbs — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:52:26 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/coder/boo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496250

Points: 95

# Comments: 28

New comment by kylecarbs in "Anthropic acquires Bun"

kylecarbs — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 18:26:55 +0000

Bun has completely changed my outlook on the JS ecosystem. Prior to Bun, there was little focus on performance. Now the entire space rallies around it.

Congrats to Jarred and the team!

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 03:47:25 +0000

Taking a look now - thanks!

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 03:45:01 +0000

I'll take a look - not sure what's going on. I'll remove it from the README for now since it's not working in the demos.

Thank you for letting me know!

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 03:20:48 +0000

Thanks for being a user :)

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:13:41 +0000

They are approximations but Ghostty has intentional effort towards correctness, more than I've seen from other terminal emulators.

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 23:00:25 +0000

Agreed. I removed "not a JavaScript approximation of one" from the README.

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 22:53:03 +0000

This is awesome, thank you!

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 22:47:28 +0000

It should work! Our demo may not (as I haven't tested it, so don't want to advertise it).

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 22:13:54 +0000

Added it to the README! Thanks again :)

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 21:44:37 +0000

See the comparison: https://github.com/coder/ghostty-web?tab=readme-ov-file#comp...

Ghostty has much better VT100 compatibility. It should have much better performance as well once we optimize.

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 21:22:45 +0000

Let me know if you encounter any issues! I'm working on performance benchmarks now.

New comment by kylecarbs in "Ghostty compiled to WASM with xterm.js API compatibility"

kylecarbs — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 21:21:52 +0000

Will do this!