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Posted by mmulet 9/9/2025

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.

1094 points | 144 commentspage 6
pancsta 9/10/2025|
Another custom wayland compositor, this one not written in a scripting language.

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

igorhvr 9/11/2025||
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.
rochak 9/10/2025||
Wow this is incredible
QuiCasseRien 9/10/2025||
insane ! but i still wonder for the use case ^^
toomim 9/11/2025|
A replacement for X11 window forwarding which has been lost with wayland.
howyesno 9/10/2025||
"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
0points 9/11/2025||
Love it!
sreenathmenon 9/10/2025||
Love it :)
mmulet 9/10/2025|
<3
dartharva 9/10/2025||
Love it!
mmulet 9/10/2025|
<3
Forgret 9/9/2025|
I wish you success in further development, don't stop!
mmulet 9/9/2025|
Thanks!
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