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…
Term.everything – Run any GUI app in the terminal launched on September 9, 2025 with 1,094 votes, #3 of 8,160 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Term.everything is a Wayland compositor built from scratch that renders graphical applications directly within the terminal. It converts GUI output to UTF-8 text using the chafa library and accepts input from standard input, allowing any GUI app to run in a terminal environment. The tool is written primarily in TypeScript to maximize developer accessibility and uses the Canvas2D API for rendering, making it approachable for contributors interested in exploring custom compositor applications.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Run any GUI app in the terminal❗. Contribute to mmulet/term.everything development by creating an account on GitHub.
Behold as I play a video game in a font in a web browser in a terminal transmitted over ssh (with one hand tied behind my back)! The quality of the window is limited to the number of rows and columns in your terminal. If you increase the resolution (ctrl - in alacritty, check your terminal) the quality will go up, (but performance may go down). Here I open up the Wing It! movie, and increase the quality until I get both a good frame rate and resolution: If your terminal supports images (like kitty or iterm2 ) you can render windows at full resolution (performance may degrade). I feel like every single day I hear about another terminal file viewer. I say, stop making terminal file viewers…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
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