Animating ASCII in the terminal with React and Ink

Plus more RSC security fixes, React Compiler speed wins, Expo SDK 55 beta, and a neat avatar generator component. |

#​460 — January 30, 2026 Read on the Web Together with   React Status The Engineering Behind GitHub Copilot CLI's Animated ASCII Banner — GitHub's Copilot CLI tool is built, like many terminal-based coding agents, around Ink, a React-powered TUI renderer. The team explains how they integrated a fancy animation into that app and, as a byproduct, GitHub's animator Cameron Foxly created ASCII Motion, a Web-based ASCII art animation tool (which is an open source React app too). Aaron Winston (GitHub) Query Billions of Rows in Milliseconds — Building dashboards or analytics features? TimescaleDB gives you hypertables for automatic partitioning, 95% compression, and continuous aggregates that refresh in real-time. Full Postgres compatibility. Start building for free. Tiger Data sponsor ⚠️ More DoS Fixes for Server Components Arrive in React 19.2.4, 19.1.5, and 19.0.4 — "It was found that the fixes to address DoS in React Server Components were incomplete and we found multiple denial of service vulnerabilities still exist in React Server Components." React Team 💡 In related security news, Vercel summarizes two DoS vulnerabilities found that affect self-hosted Next.js apps, fixed in Next.js 15.5.10, 15.6.0-canary.61, 16.1.5 and 16.2.0-canary.8. JavaScript Frameworks – Heading into 2026 — Every year, SolidJS creator Ryan Carniato takes stock of the JavaScript framework landscape. Saying we're in "an incredibly exciting time", he breaks things down across several areas of development. The momentum he's tracking is hard to ignore. Ryan Carniato IN BRIEF: Over on Reddit's /r/reactjs, a developer shares their excitement at a 'night and day' change in performance when using React Compiler. Reddit hosted a discussion on choosing TanStack Start vs React Router vs Next.js with TanStack picking up the most eager recommendations, with one commenter noting "John Resig said tanstack was awesome. That's a great endorsement." 😁 The beta period for Expo SDK 55 is in full swing. The beta uses React Native 0.83.1 and React 19.2.0 and your apps can now opt in to use Hermes v1. ▶  Improving Performance using React Server Components — This ReactNext '25 talk, given by an engineer at Vercel, provides a good primer on RSCs, then moves on to live coding some advanced patterns for getting the best performance out of them. Gal Schlezinger 🤖 Vercel Finds AGENTS.md Outperforms Skills in Evals — Vercel has been doing a lot of research into agentic development recently (releasing its React Best Practices skills just recently). But in its latest evals targeting Next.js 16 development, it found jamming an 8KB docs index into an AGENTS.md file did a better job due to skills not being reliably triggered. Vercel Clerk MCP Server for AI Coding Assistants — Connect Claude, Cursor, or Copilot to Clerk's docs. Get working auth code instead of outdated patterns. Clerk sponsor 📄 Single Flight Mutations in TanStack Start – You couldn't ask for more depth than covered in this two-part series. Adam Rackis 📄 Bringing CSS Clipping to React Native Kamil Paradowski 📄 Writing Good Unit Tests for React Elio Capella Sánchez 🛠  Code, Tools & Libraries Facehash: Unique Minimalist User Avatar Component — Not all of your users will upload an avatar, so Facehash can stand in where a blank icon might fall flat. This component gives you subtle, yet characterful, automatic avatars, and can also work as a fallback for when a user's own avatar doesn't load. Cossistant React Tilt Button: A 'Tactile' 3D Button Component — Tactile in the sense that it has a 'squishy press' to it and if you hover over it, it tilts as if there's a finger resting on it. This is a cute customizable demo. GitHub repo. Archis Vaze 🔁 Travels 1.0: A Fast, Efficient Undo/Redo Library — Add undo/redo functionality to your apps using a memory efficient technique that only stores changes rather than full snapshots for each change. A use-travel hook is available for React integration. Mutative React2AWS: AWS Infrastructure as React Components — I'm not sure how I feel about this.. are we reinventing XML? 😅 But it's certainly a creative idea and lets you write JSX which is transformed into Terraform code for prod. Marko Marinovic React Timeline Editor 1.0 – Component to build timeline-based editors (shown above). There are many examples on its site. 🤖 React Native AI v0.12.0 – On-device AI toolkit with Vercel AI SDK support. react-dropzone 14.4 – React hook providing a drag-and-drop zone for files. focus-trap-react 12.0 – Trap keyboard focus within a contained element. Rspack 2.0 Alpha 1 – Adds built-in RSC plugins (sample code). 📰 Classifieds 🛠️ Ready to implement AI with confidence (without sacrificing security)? Start building with Auth0 for AI Agents, now generally available. 🌞 Join the world's biggest React event — where your peers will be! Tech legends in sunny Amsterdam. Join React Summit with REACTSTATUS for 10% off. 📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape: Two updates for Bun: Bun v1.3.7 updates JavaScriptCore, gaining 35% faster async/await, ARM64 perf improvements, and native JSON5 and JSONL parsing support. Bun v1.3.8, adds a built-in Markdown parser. Yarn 6 is in preview. The long-standing npm alternative is going in hard on performance as it approaches its tenth birthday by porting to Rust. The final stable release isn't expected until Q3 2026. Meta's StyleX CSS-in-JS library is celebrating the new year with a new web site featuring a new playground too. "After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand." 🎨 A web-based tool for crafting SVGs.

Curated by Peter Cooper and Terence C. Gannon. A Cooperpress publication. Change your email address or Stop getting this newsletter © Cooper Press Ltd · Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom