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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: 0.919s | 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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xarope ◴[10 Sep 25 23:37 UTC] No.45205670[source]▶
one is required to ask about Gwerm, and why he is not moving... :-P
replies(2): >>45205700 #>>45205810 #
1. mmulet ◴[10 Sep 25 23:55 UTC] No.45205810[source]▶
But really, in the last 24 hours term.everything has accumulated 1500 stars, 600 upvotes on HN, 185 upvotes on lobsters (the highest upvoted `show` tag of all time), but despite all of that, you, my friend, are the first to ask about Gwerm.

That means you win the secret prize! A custom Gwerm T-shirt! I’ll send the details to the Gmail you have linked to your account.

replies(1): >>45209246 #
2. xarope ◴[11 Sep 25 08:35 UTC] No.45209246[source]▶
saw your email, thanks! As much as I would want a customized Gwerm-Jörmungandr-ouroboros t-shirt (just a random though!), I think you have already more than earned the kudos with your work, so let me just give my thanks to you for something that brightened my day today.
replies(1): >>45212386 #
3. mmulet ◴[11 Sep 25 14:53 UTC] No.45212386[source]▶
Awww, thanks for your kind words. Tell you what: should the fates align and we ever meet at a tech conference or hackathon, etc, I’ll do what I can so that you leave with some Gwerm-flavored memorabilia.