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

(github.com)
1080 points mmulet | 5 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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1. msdz ◴[10 Sep 25 22:33 UTC] No.45204989[source]▶
It's like a more generalized browsh[1].

[1] https://www.brow.sh/

replies(1): >>45205906 #
2. tombh ◴[11 Sep 25 00:05 UTC] No.45205906[source]▶
I think one significant difference though is that Browsh renders actual text for text content, so you can copy and paste, etc.
replies(1): >>45205955 #
3. mmulet ◴[11 Sep 25 00:11 UTC] No.45205955[source]▶
You will be able to copy/paste with term.everything once I implement the Wayland copy/paste interface (wl_data_device_manager).
replies(1): >>45210557 #
4. tombh ◴[11 Sep 25 12:02 UTC] No.45210557{3}[source]▶
OMG! That'd be AMAZING. But it still wouldn't render GUI text as terminal font text right?
replies(1): >>45212032 #
5. mmulet ◴[11 Sep 25 14:19 UTC] No.45212032{4}[source]▶
That’s right, it will still be pixelfied text. We could run ocr on the images then convert to text, but that’s an entirely new can of worms. Make a feature request issue on GitHub if you’re interested,