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

1094 points by mmulet 1y 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/resources/HowIDidIt.md 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.

deleted 1y ago
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Forgret 1y ago
I wish you success in further development, don't stop!
- mmulet 1y ago
  Thanks!
deleted 1y ago
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tri2820 1y 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 https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield and this
user3939382 1y ago
I've been working on the same thing but with a totally different approach. Good work! Keep it up.
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alkh 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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/blob/main/src/virtual_display.mm https://github.com/enfp-dev-studio/node-mac-virtual-display/...
        mmulet 1y ago
        100. Thanks!
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impoppy 1y ago
Can it run Doom?
- mmulet 1y ago
  It can. GIFs forthcoming.
  - mmulet 1y ago
    Looks like archive.org is down right now… so I guess we’ll have to wait for GIFS. Sorry:
- mmulet 1y ago
  Doom time! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203700
  - camdroidw 1y ago
    Wow, you're actually a crazy guy!! Good luck man, you rock
chaps 1y 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 1y ago
I remember seeing something similar named Carbonyl a while back. What a coincidence lol. https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl P.S. This is very cool btw.
- dodslaser 1y ago
  Awrit is also similar. https://github.com/chase/awrit https://github.com/chase/awrit
- patcon 1y 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 1y ago
    That’s right. These other projects are awesome, but they’re attempting something different. It’s apples to oranges.
dcreater 1y ago
[flagged]
- vidarh 1y ago
  Why not?
- colecut 1y ago
  Looks like a nice way to run a gui app on a VM remotely over an ssh connection?
- graemep 1y ago
  Because its cool.
didip 1y ago
I was about to asked about X11, but ended up learning about Wayland. Thanks for sharing!
tracker1 1y 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 1y ago
  Just use a CLI discord client, or fire up an IRC client against some Bitlbee server.
  - tracker1 1y 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 1y ago
This is absolutely unhinged and I love everything about it
lazyfanatic42 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
Love it!
- mmulet 1y ago
  <3
20after4 1y 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 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
- vidarh 1y 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 1y ago
Super cool! I also really am glad you added videos and examples in your github repo its nice to get an overview
NewUser49 1y ago
Outstanding project! Keep it up. If it ever gets renamed, consider - Terminal.All, T.All, or TAll.
- FergusArgyll 1y ago
  Termin-all was right there
  - mmulet 1y ago
    The deciding factor was that I just liked using term as a verb.
nick__m 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    <3
    - k-warburton 1y 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 1y ago
        You can have a <3 too!
  - snozolli 1y 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.
    - robot-wrangler 1y ago
      [dead]
    - anthk 1y 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...
sreenathmenon 1y ago
Love it :)
- mmulet 1y ago
  <3
nixpulvis 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
This will be very useful when it exits beta.
deleted 1y ago
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xiphias2 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
This is an incredibly cool project and you should be proud for building it.
babypuncher 1y ago
Combine this with desktop-tui[1] and say goodbye to graphical desktop managers forever! 1: https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui
rochak 1y ago
Wow this is incredible
maxglute 1y 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 1y ago
I remember the carbonyl project to run chromium in the terminal that got me really excited (https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl 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 1y ago
Wow. I love this! I actually have a specific, esoteric use for this: VSCode on iPad Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.
- chamomeal 1y ago
  Oohh wow you’re right, that’s crazy!!
- mmulet 1y ago
  I know there are ssh clients for iPad. So it should work. I’m going to try it right now!
  - mmulet 1y ago
    Behold! running on the iPad! Screen Recording - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resources/graphics/on_ipad_screen_recording.gif https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource... A video of it on the iPad - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resources/graphics/on_ipad.gif 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 1y 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 1y ago
      That is absolutely insane lmao
    - jamiek88 1y ago
      I literally laughed in delight at this.
    - jsjohnst 1y ago
howyesno 1y 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 1y ago
Do I need to be using wayland to try this? I'm still on x11.
- mmulet 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  aaquake ran under ASCII terminals before this ever existed.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    But that isn’t this, answered above.
- mmulet 1y ago
  Ask and ye shall receive: Running doom: https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resources/graphics/doom.gif 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 1y 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 1y ago
insane ! but i still wonder for the use case ^^
- toomim 1y ago
  A replacement for X11 window forwarding which has been lost with wayland.
ugh123 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  Read the replies to his comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854035#44854278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854035#44854278
Koshkin 1y ago
> in the terminal A note to myself: this won't work in the text mode.
- SkidanovAlex 1y ago
  Isn't the first example (with the cartoon) in text mode?
marcodiego 1y 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/ http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net/cursed/screenshots/
- colecut 1y ago
  why did this go away?
  - saghm 1y 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 1y ago
  Link is dead. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20080924152845/http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net:80/cursed/screenshots/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080924152845/http://zemljanka....
- pndy 1y ago
  Damn I have a vague memories of seeing this thing in Fedora Core
watersb 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    Probably not running over a network. Also I'm not seeing anything GUI-like.
    - ranger_danger 1y ago
      How about this then: https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel
      - IshKebab 1y ago
        Sixels are hilariously inefficient. Think "motion xpm".
        ranger_danger 1y ago
        But it's running over a network. I'm not sure what you're asking for otherwise.
- f33d5173 1y ago
pancsta 1y ago
Another custom wayland compositor, this one not written in a scripting language. https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
serbuvlad 1y ago
We got Wayland over vt100 escape codes over ssh over tcp before we got a headless Wayland VNC/RDP solution.
xarope 1y ago
one is required to ask about Gwerm, and why he is not moving... :-P
- mmulet 1y ago
  He is doing okay. Thanks for asking.
- mmulet 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
Does running something via Term.everything consume more or less resources, than running that something directly?
- mmulet 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
WHAT THE FUACK!? You internet people are genius sometimes
jrcii 1y ago
[dead]
roughly 1y ago
This is the exact kind of unhinged that belongs on HN. Naturally, it's written in typescript.
- codethief 1y ago
  Reminds me of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCsluv5FXA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCsluv5FXA
shonku 1y ago
Absolutely love the energy here. You really terminally outdid yourself here. Consider me officially shell-shocked.
- pbhjpbhj 1y ago
  Terrible puns. But at least you gave it a bash.
  - psd1 1y ago
    Very prompt. This thread has Bourne fruit. I'm uTTYerly impressed.
tclover 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
Love it!
maurya_anand 1y ago
Absolute madlad!! Kudos!
camdroidw 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 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 1y 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 1y 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.
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angg 1y 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.

1094 points by mmulet 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Forgret 1y ago

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

mmulet 1y ago
Thanks!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tri2820 1y 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 https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield and this

user3939382 1y ago

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

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

alkh 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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/blob/main/src/virtual_display.mm https://github.com/enfp-dev-studio/node-mac-virtual-display/...
      - mmulet 1y ago
        100. Thanks!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

impoppy 1y ago

Can it run Doom?

mmulet 1y ago
It can. GIFs forthcoming.
- mmulet 1y ago
  Looks like archive.org is down right now… so I guess we’ll have to wait for GIFS. Sorry:
mmulet 1y ago
Doom time! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203700
- camdroidw 1y ago
  Wow, you're actually a crazy guy!! Good luck man, you rock

chaps 1y 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 1y ago

I remember seeing something similar named Carbonyl a while back. What a coincidence lol. https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl P.S. This is very cool btw.

dodslaser 1y ago
Awrit is also similar. https://github.com/chase/awrit https://github.com/chase/awrit
patcon 1y 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 1y ago
  That’s right. These other projects are awesome, but they’re attempting something different. It’s apples to oranges.

dcreater 1y ago

[flagged]

vidarh 1y ago
Why not?
colecut 1y ago
Looks like a nice way to run a gui app on a VM remotely over an ssh connection?
graemep 1y ago
Because its cool.

didip 1y ago

I was about to asked about X11, but ended up learning about Wayland. Thanks for sharing!

tracker1 1y 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 1y ago
Just use a CLI discord client, or fire up an IRC client against some Bitlbee server.
- tracker1 1y 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 1y ago

This is absolutely unhinged and I love everything about it

lazyfanatic42 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

Love it!

mmulet 1y ago
<3

20after4 1y 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 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

vidarh 1y 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 1y ago

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

NewUser49 1y ago

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

FergusArgyll 1y ago
Termin-all was right there
- mmulet 1y ago
  The deciding factor was that I just liked using term as a verb.

nick__m 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  <3
  - k-warburton 1y 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 1y ago
      You can have a <3 too!
- snozolli 1y 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.
  - robot-wrangler 1y ago
    [dead]
  - anthk 1y 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...

sreenathmenon 1y ago

Love it :)

mmulet 1y ago
<3

nixpulvis 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

This will be very useful when it exits beta.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

xiphias2 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

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

babypuncher 1y ago

Combine this with desktop-tui[1] and say goodbye to graphical desktop managers forever! 1: https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui

rochak 1y ago

Wow this is incredible

maxglute 1y 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 1y ago

I remember the carbonyl project to run chromium in the terminal that got me really excited (https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl 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 1y ago

Wow. I love this! I actually have a specific, esoteric use for this: VSCode on iPad Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.

chamomeal 1y ago
Oohh wow you’re right, that’s crazy!!
mmulet 1y ago
I know there are ssh clients for iPad. So it should work. I’m going to try it right now!
- mmulet 1y ago
  Behold! running on the iPad! Screen Recording - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resources/graphics/on_ipad_screen_recording.gif https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resource... A video of it on the iPad - https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resources/graphics/on_ipad.gif 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 1y 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 1y ago
    That is absolutely insane lmao
  - jamiek88 1y ago
    I literally laughed in delight at this.
  - jsjohnst 1y ago

howyesno 1y 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 1y ago

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

mmulet 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
aaquake ran under ASCII terminals before this ever existed.
- reactordev 1y ago
  But that isn’t this, answered above.
mmulet 1y ago
Ask and ye shall receive: Running doom: https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/blob/main/resources/graphics/doom.gif 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 1y 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 1y ago

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

toomim 1y ago
A replacement for X11 window forwarding which has been lost with wayland.

ugh123 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
Read the replies to his comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854035#44854278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854035#44854278

Koshkin 1y ago

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

SkidanovAlex 1y ago
Isn't the first example (with the cartoon) in text mode?

marcodiego 1y 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/ http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net/cursed/screenshots/

colecut 1y ago
why did this go away?
- saghm 1y 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 1y ago
Link is dead. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20080924152845/http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net:80/cursed/screenshots/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080924152845/http://zemljanka....
pndy 1y ago
Damn I have a vague memories of seeing this thing in Fedora Core

watersb 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcjkezf1ARY
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Probably not running over a network. Also I'm not seeing anything GUI-like.
  - ranger_danger 1y ago
    How about this then: https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel
    - IshKebab 1y ago
      Sixels are hilariously inefficient. Think "motion xpm".
      - ranger_danger 1y ago
        But it's running over a network. I'm not sure what you're asking for otherwise.
f33d5173 1y ago

pancsta 1y ago

Another custom wayland compositor, this one not written in a scripting language. https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs

serbuvlad 1y ago

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

xarope 1y ago

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

mmulet 1y ago
He is doing okay. Thanks for asking.
mmulet 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

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

mmulet 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

WHAT THE FUACK!? You internet people are genius sometimes

jrcii 1y ago

[dead]

roughly 1y ago

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

codethief 1y ago
Reminds me of https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCsluv5FXA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCsluv5FXA

shonku 1y ago

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

pbhjpbhj 1y ago
Terrible puns. But at least you gave it a bash.
- psd1 1y ago
  Very prompt. This thread has Bourne fruit. I'm uTTYerly impressed.

tclover 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

Love it!

maurya_anand 1y ago

Absolute madlad!! Kudos!

camdroidw 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 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 1y 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 1y 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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

angg 1y 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.