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

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

462•mmulet•1d 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•1d ago

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

mmulet•1d ago

Thanks!

tri2820•1d 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•5h 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•4h 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•4h 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•3h 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•2h 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•1h ago

100. Thanks!

impoppy•4h ago

Can it run Doom?

mmulet•4h ago

It can. GIFs forthcoming.

mmulet•4h ago

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

chaps•4h 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•4h 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•3h ago

Awrit is also similar.

https://github.com/chase/awrit

patcon•3h 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•2h ago

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

didip•4h ago

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

Thanks for sharing!

tracker1•3h 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.

lxe•3h ago

This is absolutely unhinged and I love everything about it

lazyfanatic42•3h 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•3h 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•3h 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•3h ago

Love it!

20after4•3h 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•3h 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•3h ago

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

NewUser49•3h ago

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

FergusArgyll•2h ago

Termin-all was right there

mmulet•2h ago

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

nick__m•3h 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•3h 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•2h ago

k-warburton•1h 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•1h ago

You can have a <3 too!

snozolli•2h 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•1m 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...

pawelduda•47m 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•18m ago

Oops, we've invented X

GTP•25m 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...

sreenathmenon•3h ago

Love it :)

nixpulvis•3h 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.

OhMeadhbh•2h ago

This will be very useful when it exits beta.

xiphias2•2h 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

komali2•2h ago

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

babypuncher•2h ago

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

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

rochak•2h ago

Wow this is incredible

maxglute•2h 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•2h 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•1h ago

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

Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.

mmulet•1h ago

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

mmulet•53m 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)

lights0123•11m ago

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

howyesno•1h 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•1h ago

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

mmulet•1h 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•1h 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?

QuiCasseRien•55m ago

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

ugh123•52m 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•19m 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.

Koshkin•2m ago

> in the terminal

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

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UGMM-NN: Univariate Gaussian Mixture Model Neural Network

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Kerberoasting

Zoox robotaxi launches in Las Vegas

Anthropic Services Down

TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning

Insufficiently sanitized data allows unauthenticated access to FreePBX Admin

Distributing your own scripts via Homebrew

We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds

Tarsnap is cozy

Semantic Line Breaks (2017)

Delphi 13 Florence Released

Rayhunter: IMSI Catchers We Have Found So Far

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

Comments