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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
Show HN: Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal
(github.com)1046 points by mmulet 9 September 2025 | 142 comments
Comments
I am sure it was a great and fun learning experience.
Well done !
But can it run doom?
http://zemljanka.sourceforge.net/cursed/screenshots/
This is pretty much that but supercharged. Definitely really cool to see. Good work!
For example...
It looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/Eq2ToVOObviously no input though, you would have to use xdotool! The main benefit is that you probably already have all these tools installed :)
https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl
P.S. This is very cool btw.
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...
Another similar thing that I'd been meaning to look into is the RDP remote apps stuff.
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.
Hopefully supports iPadOS one day.
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.
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 love it.
1: https://github.com/Julien-cpsn/desktop-tui
- doesTerm.everything run inside tmux with automatic window resizing? I guess not, but it would be cool
Nicely done!
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!
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.
A note to myself: this won't work in the text mode.
Thanks for sharing!
Also, I'm lost for words, this is plain awesome.
https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
1. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe