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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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kposehn ◴[10 Sep 25 18:45 UTC] No.45201985[source]▶
Wow. I love this! I actually have a specific, esoteric use for this: VSCode on iPad

Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.

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mmulet ◴[10 Sep 25 19:02 UTC] No.45202189[source]▶
I know there are ssh clients for iPad. So it should work. I’m going to try it right now!
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mmulet ◴[10 Sep 25 19:50 UTC] No.45202700[source]▶
Behold! running on the iPad! Screen Recording - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource... A video of it on the iPad - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource...

Absolutely no mouse support though, anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support?

(still working on getting vscode to run smoothly)

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1. jamiek88 ◴[11 Sep 25 07:24 UTC] No.45208798[source]▶
I literally laughed in delight at this.