←back to thread

1080 points mmulet | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | 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.

1. wdavidw ◴[] No.45211700[source]
A few years back, I was deploying, operating and debugging a Hadoop cluster with Kerberos enabled behind a firewall with only the SSH port being opened. Without a web browser would have been a much more complicated task. I ended up installing the X11 client on my local macOS and the all Gnome + Firefox on one of the cluster's node. Something that is not doable with Wayland. This project work like a charm, here is a quick example on how to test it inside an Incus container (I had to install 2 additional dependencies).

  # Work with Gnome terminal but resolution is much better in something supporting images
  apt install -y kitty
  kitty
  # Create an incus container
  incus --project default launch images:ubuntu/24.04 term
  incus --project default shell term
  # Install dependencies
  apt install -y curl firefox libharfbuzz0b libfontconfig1
  curl -L -o term https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/releases/download/0.5.1/term.everything.mmulet.com-dont_forget_to_chmod_+x_this_file
  mv term.everything.mmulet.com-dont_forget_to_chmod_+x_this_file term
  chmod u+x term
  echo '<h1>Hello</h1>' > test.html
  # Start firefox, wait for a few seconds
  ./term firefox test.html