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Show HN: Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal

(github.com)
1080 points mmulet | 3 comments | 09 Sep 25 13:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.789s | source

I made a built-from scratch Wayland Compositor to display any GUI app* in the terminal! I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in custom Wayland compositors, a lot of really cool things you can embed existing applications into! So, I started with embedding apps into the terminal because that is the easiest input/output (output is just utf-8 and I use the great `chafa` library for that, and I just read from stdin for the input).

If you have any other ideas for cool Wayland compositors, let me know. I purposedly wrote 80% the app in Typescript to appeal to the most developers and attract cool contributions (I do all drawing with the familiar Canvas2D api, so if there is interest, I can also fork this out into a cool Terminal canvas, let me know!)

I have a blog post here about how I did it, but it’s pretty high level and non technical, so please ask if you have any questions.

[How I Did It](<https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource...>)

*technically only Wayland apps and x11 apps with Xwayland. But on Linux that’s mostly everything.

1. tracker1 ◴[10 Sep 25 16:55 UTC] No.45200513[source]▶
This is pretty cool, I can see this being useful when I need to run a one-off remotely. Not sure about attaching a running program then detaching again, or mirroring... I wouldn't mind being able to SSH to my desktop and manipulate say the running Discord client, or similar.

Another similar thing that I'd been meaning to look into is the RDP remote apps stuff.

replies(1): >>45203393 #
2. anthk ◴[10 Sep 25 20:43 UTC] No.45203393[source]▶
Just use a CLI discord client, or fire up an IRC client against some Bitlbee server.
replies(1): >>45204048 #
3. tracker1 ◴[10 Sep 25 21:28 UTC] No.45204048[source]▶
It was an example, not the only use case. 99% of what I want to do remote is just fine over SSH (over Wireguard)... Mostly remote VS Code usage since my desktop is much beefier than my laptop when travelling.