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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: 0.203s | 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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marcodiego ◴[10 Sep 25 21:45 UTC] No.45204328[source]▶
This is interesting, but there was something that was even more impressive many years ago: a GTK theme that rendered all decoration and widgets using text chars and a GDK backend that rendered to text. Combine both and you could run any GTK app on a terminal with legible text and a beautiful TUI.

http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net/cursed/screenshots/

replies(3): >>45204457 #>>45204767 #>>45209248 #
1. pndy ◴[11 Sep 25 08:35 UTC] No.45209248[source]▶
Damn I have a vague memories of seeing this thing in Fedora Core