Hyper 3

Hyper 3 is finally out! The primary focus for this release is performance.

The latest version includes several enhancements that make Hyperreally fast. For those of us who spend a significant amount of time on the command line, this release is a total game changer.

Download Hyper 3 to try it out, and read on to learn more about what's new.

Getting There

Looking back on this release, a pleasant surprise has been how little time it took from "let's make this thing faster" to"Holy shell! That's fast!"

Below, we visit some of the important changes that were shipped as part of this release:

WebGL Renderer

The renderer is the piece of code that draws actual pixels on the screen based on the state of the terminal. The original Hyper renderer was based on the DOM. While that was a flexible approach thanks to CSS, it was also very slow.

Hyper 2 improved upon this by switching from hterm toxterm.js and using its canvas-based renderer. While that made Hyper 2 faster, for Hyper 3 we knew it was possible to deliver even faster performance by completely rewriting the renderer with WebGL. By fortunate coincidence, as we were still figuring things out, Daniel Imms (fromxterm.js and VSCode fame),just returned from a "vacation"where he happened to be write a shiny new WebGL renderer.

Isn't the open source community just amazing? We immediately merged Daniel's branch onto a test fork, and well, it ran circles around Hyper 2. Thanks Daniel!

The Road Ahead

Terminals have existed since the 60s, and have been a powerful tool in our workflows. Their flexibility guarantees that they will remain relevant for years to come. We're in for the long haul.

Hyper is a new kind of terminal, built on top of web technology, with a focus on extensibility. This opens new possibilities that can make the CLI experience more productive (and fun)!

We're excited to keep improving Hyper, both in terms of performance and capabilities — there's a lot to do. Hyper is completely open source, and we welcome your involvement and contribution.

Acknowledgments

We're genuinely thankful to the open source community. We're not saying this only because we are building on top of an incredible set of open source libraries, but also because we find the helpful ethos of the community very touching.

As soon as the xterm.jsteam heard we were working on performance, they jumped right in and helped us with feedback and several initiatives they had on their side. We would like to extend huge thanks to Daniel Imms, @Jerch and Benjamin Staneck for their contribution and feedback.