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Posted by mmulet 4 days ago

Show HN: Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal(github.com)
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.

1050 points | 142 commentspage 5
NewUser49 3 days ago|
Outstanding project! Keep it up. If it ever gets renamed, consider - Terminal.All, T.All, or TAll.
FergusArgyll 2 days ago|
Termin-all was right there
mmulet 2 days ago||
The deciding factor was that I just liked using term as a verb.
maurya_anand 2 days ago||
Absolute madlad!! Kudos!
xarope 2 days ago||
one is required to ask about Gwerm, and why he is not moving... :-P
mmulet 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days 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.
mmulet 2 days ago||
He is doing okay. Thanks for asking.
Koshkin 2 days ago||
> in the terminal

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

SkidanovAlex 2 days ago|
Isn't the first example (with the cartoon) in text mode?
didip 3 days ago||
I was about to asked about X11, but ended up learning about Wayland.

Thanks for sharing!

rc_kas 2 days ago||
WHAT THE FUACK!? You internet people are genius sometimes
riddley 2 days ago||
Do I need to be using wayland to try this? I'm still on x11.
mmulet 2 days 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.
lxe 3 days ago||
This is absolutely unhinged and I love everything about it
OhMeadhbh 2 days ago|
This will be very useful when it exits beta.
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