portable-pty

A robust interface for forking processes with pseudoterminal file descriptors across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Portable-pty (often implemented via node-pty) provides the essential plumbing for terminal emulators like VS Code and Hyper. It handles the low-level complexities of the Unix forkpty(3) call and the Windows ConPTY API to ensure consistent TTY behavior. By abstracting OS-specific IOCTLs and master/slave device communication, it allows developers to build interactive CLI tools that maintain full terminal capabilities (including ANSI escape sequences and window resizing) regardless of the host environment.

https://github.com/microsoft/node-pty