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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: 0.462s | 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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IshKebab ◴[10 Sep 25 21:52 UTC] No.45204435[source]▶
I started working on this with the Kitty image protocol, but unfortunately that protocol is really unsuited to this sort of thing. Performance will be awful.

The protocol is sort of:

1. I'd like you to display this PNG. Here's the data: ...

2. Ok I've got the data.

3. Ok now display it at this position.

4. Ok now remove it from the screen.

We're talking motion-PNG here. Just think about how awful that is.

I wish someone would add some kind of AV1-over-terminal protocol. That would be actually useful.

The other thing I was going to try was a custom GUI that used normal terminal text for the text of widgets, but Kitty images for the rest. It's quite a hard problem though.

replies(2): >>45204606 #>>45207248 #
1. f33d5173 ◴[11 Sep 25 03:04 UTC] No.45207248[source]▶
What you're describing is a graphical shell. If you want it over the network, we have a protocol for that, it's called X. Misusing a terminal for this is fundamentally pointless.
replies(1): >>45208404 #
2. IshKebab ◴[11 Sep 25 06:15 UTC] No.45208404[source]▶
Nope. X is too slow to be useful except on local networks, and alternatives like FreeNX or xpra are difficulty and janky to set up. Also X is dying so you really mean something like waypipe or worse (which also jankily failed to run some external command when I last tried it).

But I don't want that anyway. I want something graphical that's actually integrated into the terminal.