Show HN: Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal

https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything

1094•mmulet•5mo ago

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.

Comments

Forgret•5mo ago

I wish you success in further development, don't stop!

mmulet•5mo ago

Thanks!

tri2820•5mo ago

This is such a cool project. Personally, I think there are so many interesting use cases that can be built on top of Wayland, like https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield and this

alkh•5mo ago

This is so cool, thanks for sharing! Having this on a Mac would be great but I understand that this might be a huge undertaking :)

mmulet•5mo ago

I definitely want to make a macOS version, but I haven’t even looked into it yet. So, I don’t know the level of hacking required. It definitely doesn’t sound like anything Apple would have an api for, so it would probably be a vnc or accessibility api trick.

krackers•5mo ago

I think there is an API (that was added with sidecar) to create a virtual display. So at best you could retrieve the framebuffer and then display that. I don't think there is an easy exposed way to get per-window information, aside from doing a screencapture (which likely would not work if you also wanted to hide the window).

mmulet•5mo ago

Interesting… do you have a link to the docs? The easiest thing prob would be to set the window to be fullscreen, but on that virtual display. That would accomplish per window screen capture.

krackers•4mo ago

It's a private API CGVirtualDisplay, but mostly well reverse engineered. Here's one example I found of a wrapper library

https://github.com/enfp-dev-studio/node-mac-virtual-display/...

mmulet•4mo ago

100. Thanks!

impoppy•5mo ago

Can it run Doom?

mmulet•5mo ago

It can. GIFs forthcoming.

mmulet•5mo ago

Looks like archive.org is down right now… so I guess we’ll have to wait for GIFS. Sorry:

mmulet•4mo ago

Doom time!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203700

camdroidw•4mo ago

Wow, you're actually a crazy guy!!

Good luck man, you rock

chaps•5mo ago

Neat! I did a similar project many years ago just to see if I could with ANSI color stuff to animate video in my terminal. Worked really well, but it looked like absolute butt (unlike this project).

Nicely done!

fzorb•5mo ago

I remember seeing something similar named Carbonyl a while back. What a coincidence lol.

https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

P.S. This is very cool btw.

dodslaser•5mo ago

Awrit is also similar.

https://github.com/chase/awrit

patcon•4mo ago

I truly appreciate the relational thinking and pointing out other projects that might interest ppl who are excited about this :) Having said that, term.everything seems to be much larger in scope than a browser, unless I'm mistaken

mmulet•4mo ago

That’s right. These other projects are awesome, but they’re attempting something different. It’s apples to oranges.

didip•5mo ago

I was about to asked about X11, but ended up learning about Wayland.

Thanks for sharing!

tracker1•5mo ago

This is pretty cool, I can see this being useful when I need to run a one-off remotely. Not sure about attaching a running program then detaching again, or mirroring... I wouldn't mind being able to SSH to my desktop and manipulate say the running Discord client, or similar.

Another similar thing that I'd been meaning to look into is the RDP remote apps stuff.

anthk•4mo ago

Just use a CLI discord client, or fire up an IRC client against some Bitlbee server.

tracker1•4mo ago

It was an example, not the only use case. 99% of what I want to do remote is just fine over SSH (over Wireguard)... Mostly remote VS Code usage since my desktop is much beefier than my laptop when travelling.

lxe•5mo ago

This is absolutely unhinged and I love everything about it

lazyfanatic42•4mo ago

It is funny but this is what I wished things did when I first started using Linux back in the day. '98-'99 timeframe, then I "learned" better that there was Xorg/X11,etc.

quotemstr•4mo ago

Great job! If you tug on this thread long and hard enough, you develop this enough and you get RDP (which you can try via xrdp, GNOME's remoting thing, etc.).

The reason the terminal ecosystem doesn't get much more sophisticated over time isn't just the herd-of-cats fragmentation, but also evaporative cooling: people who do really cool things with terminal come to realize that what they really want is remote desktop (perhaps rootless) and leave terminal stuff as-is while they invest in more sophisticated systems instead.

christophilus•4mo ago

Wow. This is amazing. I have started running a lot of stuff in containers by default for a whole host of reasons, and this may make my workflow even better on the occasions when I want to run a graphical app.

dartharva•4mo ago

Love it!

mmulet•4mo ago

20after4•4mo ago

You could use a terminal graphics protocol to render real graphics. But there is already waypipe¹ to do that kind of remoting. Without using an actual terminal.

1. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

vidarh•4mo ago

> You could use a terminal graphics protocol to render real graphics.

It already does that[1].

> But there is already waypipe¹ to do that kind of remoting.

That requires Wayland on the client side, doesn't it? I don't expect this to be super-practical anyway, but it's fun to see how far you can push a terminal.

[1] "If your terminal supports images (like kitty or iterm2) you can render windows at full resolution (performance may degrade)."

beckthompson•4mo ago

Super cool! I also really am glad you added videos and examples in your github repo its nice to get an overview

NewUser49•4mo ago

Outstanding project! Keep it up. If it ever gets renamed, consider - Terminal.All, T.All, or TAll.

FergusArgyll•4mo ago

Termin-all was right there

mmulet•4mo ago

The deciding factor was that I just liked using term as a verb.

nick__m•4mo ago

That's awesomely useless, it straddles the line between programming and art.

I am sure it was a great and fun learning experience.

Well done !

actsasbuffoon•4mo ago

Yeah, I can’t explain why this project makes me so happy because I struggle to think of any time where I’d need this, but it puts a big, dumb grin on my face.

mmulet•4mo ago

k-warburton•4mo ago

I came here to make the same comment. I want to try this myself just for the fun of it and the grin it will put on my face. Nice work!

mmulet•4mo ago

You can have a <3 too!

snozolli•4mo ago

It reminds me a bit of chindōgu, the Japanese art (?) of useless inventions. There's a particular delight to ingenious, but absurd or useless creations.

anthk•4mo ago

Emacs it's full of chindogus. Also, there's geekcode, xroach, megahal/hailo, xneko, aatv and mplayer rendering videos over aalib, aaquake, eforth running in the subleq virtual machine...

DiggyJohnson•4mo ago

I’m a fan of `xeyes`

watersb•4mo ago

xeyes can be Actually Useful; two eyes always looking at the cursor...

your animal brain hardwired to discern the direction of gaze of the eyes facing you (citations appreciated)...

Helps me find the mouse cursor on a big screen if I lose track, even with small parallax angle.

On macOS, I just wiggle the mouse back and forth, and the cursor gets really big, it pops out at you.

I generally don't keep `xeyes` running. But it's a righteous, venerable hack.

vrighter•4mo ago

you can also do the mouse wiggle thing on kde. And unlike macs, the cursor never stops growing until you stop shaking. You can literally get it to cover the whole screen. So funny for me

hiccuphippo•4mo ago

I remember watching the World Cup over telnet with one of those aalib libraries years ago. The signal arrived 5 seconds earlier than the TV :)

anthk•4mo ago

With a small framebuffer font aatv was almost watchable over a distance, but OFC fbtv made it obsolete, and ditto with mplayer -vo aalib as movies worked in the framebuffer just as fine as X.

But I remember the BB demo and I still remember these catchy s3m modules...

https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/

And, well, not AA, but I still play today tons of text adventures and roguelikes (and BSDgames and such), and my main X environment it's CLI/TUI based except for CWM (Window manager), MPV/MuPDF/NSxiv (images) and djview4 for DJVU files..

hnlmorg•4mo ago

That’s a term I’ve not heard in literally decades.

Thanks for the reminder

pawelduda•4mo ago

Well, you can run apps on any less capable device with ssh and proper terminal display. You can limit data usage by offloading video buffering to the host (however not sure if that's net positive saving). And put the host behind VPN to avoid getting region blocks.

unleaded•4mo ago

Oops, we've invented X

blooalien•4mo ago

I actually used to tunnel Netscape Navigator via SSH to my Commodore Amiga desktop via an Xorg server way back in the 56K phone modem Internet days from my ISP's SSH user account login, since Amiga didn't have Netscape (and even if it did, the Amiga likely would have choked on it, massive and bloated as Netscape was), and the browser AmigaOS did have just wasn't up to the task of normal day-to-day usage of the Web as it existed back then. Fun times.

Sure am glad of the broadband Internet and modern "powerhouse" PCs we have so readily available today. Hell, even the computer most everyone carries in their pocket these days is infinitely more powerful than the average desktop machines of my childhood. :)

msdz•4mo ago

It's like a more generalized browsh[1].

[1] https://www.brow.sh/

tombh•4mo ago

I think one significant difference though is that Browsh renders actual text for text content, so you can copy and paste, etc.

mmulet•4mo ago

You will be able to copy/paste with term.everything once I implement the Wayland copy/paste interface (wl_data_device_manager).

tombh•4mo ago

OMG! That'd be AMAZING. But it still wouldn't render GUI text as terminal font text right?

mmulet•4mo ago

That’s right, it will still be pixelfied text. We could run ocr on the images then convert to text, but that’s an entirely new can of worms. Make a feature request issue on GitHub if you’re interested,

GTP•4mo ago

Well, not 100% useless: I can see its use for applications running inside Docker containers. Yes, there are ways to have GUI applications rendered from the inside of a container, but maybe this is easier than getting the Dockerfile right.

EDIT: nevermind, doing this with Docker seems much easier than I expected [0]. I'll try it tomorrow, I'm curious to see if the proposed solution works on Windows as well.

[0] https://medium.com/@priyamsanodiya340/running-gui-applicatio...

nicce•4mo ago

Windows had Wayland support before most distros! Rather surprising.

0points•4mo ago

> Windows had Wayland support before most distros! Rather surprising.

WSL had non-accelerated wayland support at one point in time.

Was it before "most distros"?

I don't understand what you think that amounts to.

Wayland support in Linux-land typically means that the software supports running in your wayland compositor.

Windows famously is not a wayland compositor, no matter how much you try to bend reality.

dmayle•4mo ago

Definitely not useless!

I run a ttyd server to get terminal over https, and I have used carbonyl over that to get work done. That's limited to a web browser (to get access to resources not exposed via the public internet), so having full GUI support is very useful

sreenathmenon•4mo ago

Love it :)

mmulet•4mo ago

nixpulvis•4mo ago

This is one of those things I'm going to keep in my back pocket for a very specific time I need it for a weird reason.

I love it.

camdroidw•4mo ago

Some apps you install just out of pure respect, this is one of those. Like I also have eagle view that I never use.

OhMeadhbh•4mo ago

This will be very useful when it exits beta.

xiphias2•4mo ago

- Can you run a compositor inside a compositor? I'd love to just ssh to a server and run hyprland

- doesTerm.everything run inside tmux with automatic window resizing? I guess not, but it would be cool

mmulet•4mo ago

1. Yes, but it depends on your compositor because your compositor needs to be able to run as a nested Wayland client. I think there is support for this in wlroots based Wayland compositors, but I'm not sure if hyperland supports it.

2. I think it will work, but I haven't tried. I redraw the terminal window every time the "termed" window updates. So, if you are playing a video for example and you dynamically resize the window, it should update the size automatically. If you are viewing a static window it might not.

komali2•4mo ago

This is an incredibly cool project and you should be proud for building it.

babypuncher•4mo ago

Combine this with desktop-tui[1] and say goodbye to graphical desktop managers forever!

1: https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui

rochak•4mo ago

Wow this is incredible

maxglute•4mo ago

Stupid, love it. Occasionally I'll use shaderglass ascii shader on oled screen to play videos with pixel ratio that makes UI unreadable, but it's charming experience.

warwren•4mo ago

I remember the carbonyl project to run chromium in the terminal that got me really excited (https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl) but it eventually became unmaintained.

This is pretty much that but supercharged. Definitely really cool to see. Good work!

kposehn•4mo ago

Wow. I love this! I actually have a specific, esoteric use for this: VSCode on iPad

Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.

mmulet•4mo ago

I know there are ssh clients for iPad. So it should work. I’m going to try it right now!

mmulet•4mo ago

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)

oarsinsync•4mo ago

> anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support

Blink terminal for iOS and iPadOS. Ships with vscode support built in too.

chamomeal•4mo ago

That is absolutely insane lmao

jamiek88•4mo ago

I literally laughed in delight at this.

jsjohnst•4mo ago

> anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support?

Prompt 3 from Panic

mmulet•4mo ago

Thanks, I’ll check that out

lights0123•4mo ago

I tend to use https://github.com/coder/code-server#code-server for my remote development needs.

chamomeal•4mo ago

Oohh wow you’re right, that’s crazy!!

howyesno•4mo ago

"I feel like every single day I hear about another terminal file viewer. I say, stop making terminal file viewers because you can just use the file viewer you already have! In your terminal!" LMAO

riddley•4mo ago

Do I need to be using wayland to try this? I'm still on x11.

mmulet•4mo ago

No you do not. It works on x11 and Wayland host systems. I built the Wayland compositor from scratch and it does not have any dependencies on libwayland. So, you don’t have to install Wayland at all.

reactordev•4mo ago

This is one of those things that pushes the boundaries to nowhere, yet everywhere at the same time whilst being incredibly awesome and something you can show off ad infinitum. Outstanding! Not sure how we’ll implement vdi now! Gives ghost in the shell a whole new meaning.

But can it run doom?

anthk•4mo ago

aaquake ran under ASCII terminals before this ever existed.

reactordev•4mo ago

But that isn’t this, answered above.

mmulet•4mo ago

Ask and ye shall receive: Running doom: https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource...

I had the change a couple of line to make it work because term.everything takes input only from stdin (this way it works of ssh and is pretty broadly compatible across terminals).

1. I had to remap another key to the control key (which is usually used to send signals like sigterm)

2. Then I had to change the timeout in which keys are pressed. When using stdin, you get a keydown event, but you don't get a key up event (ever). So I have to guess when you want to key up. Most of the time, I can send key up right away. But, it looks like doom has some sort of key debounce, so I had to wait 50-100 ms for keyup. Then there is the problem of if you want to walk forward in games you usually hold down up arrow, but now you have to rapidly press it! Not ideal, but it does work, and it it playable.

reactordev•4mo ago

Phenomenal!!!

I used to write telnet games so I know all about keypress up never coming through. Even with immediate mode (so repeated keys will send repeated key codes while held down) it never tells you when it stops. You have to read the buffer ascii byte by byte. Still, awesome to see. Great work!!!

QuiCasseRien•4mo ago

insane ! but i still wonder for the use case ^^

toomim•4mo ago

A replacement for X11 window forwarding which has been lost with wayland.

ugh123•4mo ago

This could be used on build machines I own where I occasionally need to interact with the desktop and/or browser on the machine and vnc or other desktop sharing is impractical or exposes security issues.

teknopaul•4mo ago

Someone needs to make bash_completion really trivial to write.

It isn't: and even copy paste is hard. Clever people write apps that are bash_completion friendly.

If first main arg is bash friendly

mycli myfunc ...

Myour whole cliapp becomes "discoverable" with one tab keystroke that you probably already typed hopefully anyway.

Never need to advertise a new feature.

Deprecate by removing from completion without breaking scripts.

Then _everything_ already is in your cli, because someone already did it.

camdroidw•4mo ago

Read the replies to his comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854035#44854278

Koshkin•4mo ago

> in the terminal

A note to myself: this won't work in the text mode.

SkidanovAlex•4mo ago

Isn't the first example (with the cartoon) in text mode?

marcodiego•4mo ago

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/

colecut•4mo ago

why did this go away?

saghm•4mo ago

Maybe linking to this reminded the owner that they had a sourceforge account they had forgotten about, and they took the opportunity to delete it.

GranPC•4mo ago

Link is dead. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20080924152845/http://zemljanka....

pndy•4mo ago

Damn I have a vague memories of seeing this thing in Fedora Core

watersb•4mo ago

I love this.

I would go for weeks just in a large framebuffer terminal, no GUI running. And I still run some servers that way.

Terminally insanely great!

IshKebab•4mo ago

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.

ranger_danger•4mo ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY

IshKebab•4mo ago

Probably not running over a network. Also I'm not seeing anything GUI-like.

ranger_danger•4mo ago

How about this then: https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

IshKebab•4mo ago

Sixels are hilariously inefficient. Think "motion xpm".

ranger_danger•4mo ago

But it's running over a network. I'm not sure what you're asking for otherwise.

f33d5173•4mo ago

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.

IshKebab•4mo ago

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.

pancsta•4mo ago

Another custom wayland compositor, this one not written in a scripting language.

https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs

serbuvlad•4mo ago

We got Wayland over vt100 escape codes over ssh over tcp before we got a headless Wayland VNC/RDP solution.

xarope•4mo ago

one is required to ask about Gwerm, and why he is not moving... :-P

mmulet•4mo ago

He is doing okay. Thanks for asking.

mmulet•4mo ago

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.

xarope•4mo ago

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.

mmulet•4mo ago

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.

Guestmodinfo•4mo ago

I like it. I always want to run things in a terminal. Because 1. I used to think that's more secure than X 2. I always seem to get better audio of the videos that I run in tty and my mouse is much smoother in the tty. Yes I can move mouse in tty.

Also someone mentioned a cool project like carbonyl. They also mentioned brow.sh which I have heard but they described it in detail so that's another plus when term.everything kind of projects come they drag other cool projects to he foreground

Point 1 of mine may be pure superstition.

How term.everything works on tty I don't know maybe it will be horriblebecause of the resolution thing but still it's a nice direction.

mathfailure•4mo ago

Does running something via Term.everything consume more or less resources, than running that something directly?

mmulet•4mo ago

Depends on what resolution your terminal is set to. (Not the resolution of the GUI app you use, just the resolution you display it). At low resolution (640x480) it’s pretty performant, but at 4K I can hear my fans going full blast.

igorhvr•4mo ago

This is so cool - thank you! I have a very (ahem) useful purpose for this: I use a command line application that calls back to a browser during authentication and that alone prevented me from doing what I needed/wanted from an ssh terminal... I will now happily laugh my ass off as it launches firefox from inside my terminal every time I use it.

rc_kas•4mo ago

WHAT THE FUACK!? You internet people are genius sometimes

user3939382•4mo ago

I've been working on the same thing but with a totally different approach. Good work! Keep it up.

roughly•4mo ago

This is the exact kind of unhinged that belongs on HN. Naturally, it's written in typescript.

codethief•4mo ago

Reminds me of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCsluv5FXA

shonku•4mo ago

Absolutely love the energy here. You really terminally outdid yourself here. Consider me officially shell-shocked.

pbhjpbhj•4mo ago

Terrible puns. But at least you gave it a bash.

psd1•4mo ago

Very prompt. This thread has Bourne fruit. I'm uTTYerly impressed.

tclover•4mo ago

I tried recently once again to ditch Windows for Linux. Everything kinda worked, but the MediaTek Wi-Fi drivers were janky and my speed was like 10x slower than it should’ve been. After spending about 10 hours messing around with configs, I realized I was doing literally everything except what I actually wanted to do when I turned on the PC… so I just went back and installed LTSC Windows again.

saghm•4mo ago

I don't really understand the relevance of this comment to this thread, but since it's here...I remember running into something somewhat similar when trying to dual-boot Windows for something on a machine I already had Linux installed on, and while I can't remember whether it was actually MediaTek or not, I think it might have been. If my recollection is correct, I ended up figuring out that having the wifi configured to 1 Gbps in Windows somehow reverted the wifi to only 100 Mbps in Linux, and the only way for me to fix it was to boot back into Windows and switch it to whatever it had been by default (I think 100 Mbps?). Not sure if this is something you care enough to actually try out or not, but I figured it couldn't hurt to mention!

0points•4mo ago

Love it!

maurya_anand•4mo ago

Absolute madlad!! Kudos!

camdroidw•4mo ago

Going to be a repetitive asshole but guys please remember lesson 1 of marketing for engineers: learn to post videos/screenshot first thing.

Also, I'm lost for words, this is plain awesome.

nxobject•4mo ago

Surprisingly enough, my keyboard is missing the "V", "N", and "C" keys. Thank you for helping me save money by not buying a new keyboard!

wdavidw•4mo ago

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

SJC_Hacker•4mo ago

This could be useful for testing UI elements of apps ...

Modern UI applications are way too tightly coupled for my liking, and difficult to test especially if you don't practice "separation of concerns", e.g. decoupling the app logic from its presentation.

Haven't looked at the full thing but something like this might allow you to write tests for UI apps without actually having the UI backend...

taviso•4mo ago

It's fun, but reminds me of a trick using Xvfb.

For example...

    $ Xvfb :7 &
    [1] 21688
    $ xeyes -display :7 &
    [2] 21697
    $ xwd -display :7 -name xeyes -out /dev/stdout | convert xwd:- sixel:-

It looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/Eq2ToVO

Obviously no input though, you would have to use xdotool! The main benefit is that you probably already have all these tools installed :)

FortuneIIIPick•4mo ago

Looks like you're on Windows? You can run X apps with XMing, I used to do it years ago. You can run the actual X app and use it, not just get a screenshot.

taviso•4mo ago

The point is to view it in a terminal (e.g. XTerm, Konsole, etc), of course you can just run it in an X server.

angg•4mo ago

Always loved brow.sh as a concept, love this even more. I can easily see myself practically using this in a pinch as a clever little hack when I'd rather not mess around with X or RDP.

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