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

(github.com)
1080 points mmulet | 10 comments | 09 Sep 25 13:16 UTC | HN request time: 1.211s | source | bottom

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. kposehn ◴[10 Sep 25 18:45 UTC] No.45201985[source]▶
Wow. I love this! I actually have a specific, esoteric use for this: VSCode on iPad

Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.

replies(3): >>45202189 #>>45203218 #>>45207538 #
2. mmulet ◴[10 Sep 25 19:02 UTC] No.45202189[source]▶
I know there are ssh clients for iPad. So it should work. I’m going to try it right now!
replies(1): >>45202700 #
3. mmulet ◴[10 Sep 25 19:50 UTC] No.45202700[source]▶
Behold! running on the iPad! Screen Recording - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource... A video of it on the iPad - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource...

Absolutely no mouse support though, anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support?

(still working on getting vscode to run smoothly)

replies(4): >>45203541 #>>45207581 #>>45208798 #>>45211621 #
4. lights0123 ◴[10 Sep 25 20:31 UTC] No.45203218[source]▶
I tend to use https://github.com/coder/code-server#code-server for my remote development needs.
5. oarsinsync ◴[10 Sep 25 20:55 UTC] No.45203541{3}[source]▶
> anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support

Blink terminal for iOS and iPadOS. Ships with vscode support built in too.

6. chamomeal ◴[11 Sep 25 03:42 UTC] No.45207538[source]▶
Oohh wow you’re right, that’s crazy!!
7. chamomeal ◴[11 Sep 25 03:50 UTC] No.45207581{3}[source]▶
That is absolutely insane lmao
8. jamiek88 ◴[11 Sep 25 07:24 UTC] No.45208798{3}[source]▶
I literally laughed in delight at this.
9. jsjohnst ◴[11 Sep 25 13:47 UTC] No.45211621{3}[source]▶
> anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support?

Prompt 3 from Panic

replies(1): >>45212234 #
10. mmulet ◴[11 Sep 25 14:38 UTC] No.45212234{4}[source]▶
Thanks, I’ll check that out