wterm-rust

A Rust port of the high-performance wterm terminal emulator for the web.

Originally written in Zig, this project migrates the core VT100/VT220/xterm escape sequence parser and state machine to Rust (compiled to WASM). The frontend remains standard DOM/React for flawless accessibility, text selection, and screen reader support.

Prototype Demo

Here is a recording of the headless browser interacting with the terminal emulator, automatically captured during our Playwright visual regression tests:

(If the video above doesn't render, check demo.webm in the repository).

Migration Status

This project uses an agent-driven development workflow:

1. Core Translation: Autonomous agents (Claude Code) are actively porting parser.zig, terminal.zig, grid.zig, and cell.zig to Rust #[no_mangle] equivalents.
2. Visual Parity: We use Playwright Interactive to capture screenshots of the original Zig WASM and compare them against the Rust WASM under identical sequence inputs.
3. ABI Adherence: The Rust codebase strictly implements the 12-byte C-ABI cell layouts expected by the @wterm/core TypeScript bridge.

Inspiration & Citations

• Original Author: Florian Narr
• Original Repository: vercel-labs/wterm
• Goal: Bring safe, structured concurrency to the parser state machine while maintaining the 12-byte memory layout required for zero-copy DOM rendering.