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

(github.com)
1080 points mmulet | 2 comments | 09 Sep 25 13:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. riddley ◴[10 Sep 25 18:58 UTC] No.45202144[source]▶
Do I need to be using wayland to try this? I'm still on x11.
replies(1): >>45202202 #
2. mmulet ◴[10 Sep 25 19:02 UTC] No.45202202[source]▶
No you do not. It works on x11 and Wayland host systems. I built the Wayland compositor from scratch and it does not have any dependencies on libwayland. So, you don’t have to install Wayland at all.