Hyper for Mac

Quick summary: a terminal built on web tech

Hyper is a lightweight terminal emulator that uses web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) on top of Electron. It aims to be cross-platform and developer-friendly, offering a minimal default experience that you can extend or reshape to suit your workflow.

Notable capabilities

• Support for split panes and fast keyboard shortcuts for managing multiple shell sessions.
• Deep customization of both the user interface and underlying behavior.
• Uses standard web technologies for its UI layer, so front-end tweaks are done with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Can be used to open web pages or remote resources via command-line operations in some configurations.
• Built on Electron, leveraging a framework already common for cross-platform desktop apps.
• Designed to be small out of the box and extended through community code rather than packing every feature by default.

Extending and customizing Hyper

Hyper’s architecture encourages extensions. Add-ons are typically Node.js packages that integrate with Hyper’s runtime and are picked up by the Electron render process. Creating or modifying plugins requires familiarity with web development (Node, JavaScript, and front-end tooling), but allows you to change behavior at many points rather than only a few fixed hooks.

Pricing and where to start

Hyper is free and open source. That makes it easy to try, modify, and share configurations or plugins. If you want to experiment, check the official repository or community plugin lists to find starter themes and extensions.

Other terminals to try

• ConEmu — a Windows-focused console with many built-in configuration options.
• The native Terminal apps (macOS Terminal, Windows Console/Windows Terminal) — simple, platform-integrated choices for many users.
• iTerm2 — a popular macOS alternative with a rich feature set for power users.

Bottom line

If you’re comfortable with web technologies and prefer a terminal that you can shape with custom code and plugins, Hyper is a good fit. It purposefully ships with a compact feature set so the community and your own extensions provide the features you need.