> Gridland is the successor to Ink Web (ink-web.dev) which is the same concept, but using Ink + xterm.js. After building Ink Web, we continued experimenting and found that using OpenTUI and a canvas renderer performed better with less flickering and nearly instant load times.
Ah, I was wondering how this was different to xterm.js embedded in a page. It's just the performance angle? I've been teaching the kids programming from the terminal and I've been planning to make the jump from the terminal to a terminal in the browser as we hit graphical limitations (and as they want to be able to share their games). I'll take it for a spin.
(and if nothing else, I'm going to steal that ripple effect for them ;) )*
* obligatory https://xkcd.com/541/
Yep, mainly performance - specifically page load time (near instant for Gridland vs ~2-3s for Ink Web). The other issue was flickering. Tbh rendering directly into a canvas is just a better approach and OpenTUI's architect is more modern.
I love that xkcd, I never know what to do, so I'll just ：）)
Can confirm good canvas renderer performance. Just tested it with a real-time smart meter dashboard — 62 meters streaming over MQTT via JustinX.ai (our data ingestion platform), 60 msg/s (peak), 500ms refresh. Almost no flicker, smooth updates across all meter cards. Much nicer way to handle high-frequency streaming data than xterm.js.
Check out the video screen grab: https://streamable.com/hcga8t