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…
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
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 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.
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