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

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.

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 !

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...

Windows had Wayland support before most distros! Rather surprising.

> 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.

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.

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.

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. :)

Oops, we've invented X

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.

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...

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 :)

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..

I’m a fan of `xeyes`

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.

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

Thanks for the reminder

[dead]

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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!

You can have a <3 too!

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

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?

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.

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!!!

aaquake ran under ASCII terminals before this ever existed.

But that isn’t this, answered above.

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

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

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

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/

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

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

why did this go away?

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.

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Awrit is also similar.

https://github.com/chase/awrit

[deleted]

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...

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

Thanks!

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.

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

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

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)

> anyone know of an iPad ssh client with mouse support

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

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

Prompt 3 from Panic

Thanks, I’ll check that out

I literally laughed in delight at this.

That is absolutely insane lmao

Oohh wow you’re right, that’s crazy!!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Sixels are hilariously inefficient. Think "motion xpm".

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

[deleted]

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

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

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.

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

Can it run Doom?

It can. GIFs forthcoming.

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

Doom time!

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

Wow, you're actually a crazy guy!!

Good luck man, you rock

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.

- 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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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!

[deleted]

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 :)

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.

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).

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.

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/...

100. Thanks!

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.

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

Absolute madlad!! Kudos!

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

Termin-all was right there

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

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

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.

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.

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.

He is doing okay. Thanks for asking.

> in the terminal

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

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

WHAT THE FUACK!? You internet people are genius sometimes

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

Thanks for sharing!

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

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.

This is absolutely unhinged and I love everything about it

[deleted]

This will be very useful when it exits beta.

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.

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

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

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.

Wow this is incredible

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

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

Love it!

"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

Love it :)

Love it!

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.

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!

[deleted]

[dead]

[flagged]

Looks like a nice way to run a gui app on a VM remotely over an ssh connection?

Because its cool.

Why not?

[deleted]

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

> 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)."