A single prompt brought my favorite terminal back from the dead
Every time I try another terminal, I end up back in Hyper. A terminal is usually just a black box where developers type commands. Hyper gave that black box themes, tabs, and plugins, and made it feel like an app I actually wanted to open. I have used it for years.
Then Hyper stopped moving. Its latest stable release is from January 2023. One maintenance commit appeared in May 2026, and it only changed pnpm. That's it. The repo is barely maintained.
The old macOS version also appeared in a published security advisory. By then, using the terminal I loved had become a liability. I did not want another terminal. I wanted Hyper back!
"exactly one instruction"...
I opened Claude and gave it exactly one instruction:
convert this entire project to rust. make it native!
and create the new rust project in "../hyper-revamp-rust/"
That prompt got me about 70% of the way there.
I expected Claude to give me a rough shell. Maybe a blank window, a pile of broken code, and a long weekend ahead. Instead, it converted most of the app in one shot. It kept the parts that made Hyper feel like Hyper and rebuilt the app in native Rust.
The original Hyper carries a small web browser around inside the app because its interface was written in Electron (a web technology). My version is just a terminal. It opens one native process and gets to work.
No browser hiding inside it. No extra layers pretending to be a desktop app. Just the terminal.
This is the new Hyper running on my Mac.
Here's the repo, for anyone who wants to see it.
"the easy part"...
The first 70% was the easy part. The last 30% was where it became my terminal.
A few small behaviors felt wrong, some things just didn't work entirely. The right-click menu did not work. Autocomplete did not work. Boring problems like that. But they were the difference between a demo I could post online and an app I could use every day.
Claude got me a working rewrite. I spent the rest of the time turning it into a terminal I actually wanted to use.
"It felt instant"...
The first time I opened the finished Rust version, it felt instant and magical! My old terminal was back!
I ran a bunch of benchmarks, and the results were amazing!
Startup was the change I felt first. The rewrite also shrank the app from the size of a short video to something closer to a few photos.
| What I noticed | Original Hyper | My Rust version | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ready for typing | 1.22 seconds | 0.32 seconds | 3.8× faster |
| Memory while idle | 464 MB | 146 MB | 68% less |
| Processor time for the same test | 47.4 seconds | 8.2 seconds | 83% less |
| Space on disk | 230 MB | 17 MB | 93% smaller |
I put the full benchmark and method in the project for anyone who wants every number.
Rust is not a magic adjective. The win came from removing a lot of machinery I did not need: the built-in browser, the JavaScript runtime, and the extra processes connecting them. Rewriting the app gave me a chance to keep the experience and throw away the weight.
"the plugins had nowhere to run"...
I traded compatibility for control. Hyper's plugins were made for the old web-based app. Think of them like browser extensions. Once I removed the browser, the plugins had nowhere to run.
I converted the plugins I use into Rust. The rest of the Hyper plugin store is still missing. If your setup depends on those plugins, the original is still better for you.
Hyper was a platform. Hyper-revamp is my terminal.
"It's just a rewrite in Rust"...
Someone will look at this and say, "It's just a rewrite in Rust."
It is! And that's the point.
I did not need to invent a new kind of terminal. I did not need to bolt an AI chat box onto the command line. I wanted the same Hyper I already loved, except current, fast, reliable, and mine.
Now I open my favorite terminal again and it makes me happy. One sentence got 70% of the code there. The last 30% brought Hyper back from the dead!
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