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

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 !

GTP · 3 months 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...

nicce · 3 months ago

Windows had Wayland support before most distros! Rather surprising.

actsasbuffoon · 3 months 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.

snozolli · 3 months 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.

pawelduda · 3 months 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.

msdz · 3 months ago

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

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

mmulet · 3 months ago

dmayle · 3 months ago

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?

mmulet · 3 months ago

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.

reactordev · 3 months 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!!!

anthk · 3 months ago

aaquake ran under ASCII terminals before this ever existed.

reactordev · 3 months ago

But that isn’t this, answered above.

# 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

nick__m · 3 months ago

shonku · 3 months ago

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

pbhjpbhj · 3 months ago

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

psd1 · 3 months ago

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

tri2820 · 3 months 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

marcodiego · 3 months 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/

GranPC · 3 months ago

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

pndy · 3 months ago

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

colecut · 3 months ago

why did this go away?

saghm · 3 months 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.

warwren · 3 months 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!

serbuvlad · 3 months ago

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

wdavidw · 3 months 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).