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

(github.com)
1080 points mmulet | 1 comments | 09 Sep 25 13:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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.

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nick__m ◴[10 Sep 25 17:24 UTC] No.45200895[source]▶
That's awesomely useless, it straddles the line between programming and art.

I am sure it was a great and fun learning experience.

Well done !

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actsasbuffoon ◴[10 Sep 25 17:35 UTC] No.45201051[source]▶
Yeah, I can’t explain why this project makes me so happy because I struggle to think of any time where I’d need this, but it puts a big, dumb grin on my face.
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snozolli ◴[10 Sep 25 18:05 UTC] No.45201507[source]▶
It reminds me a bit of chindōgu, the Japanese art (?) of useless inventions. There's a particular delight to ingenious, but absurd or useless creations.
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1. hnlmorg ◴[10 Sep 25 21:03 UTC] No.45203688[source]▶
That’s a term I’ve not heard in literally decades.

Thanks for the reminder