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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal.

Is anyone working on this?

With the speed terminals are and support for graphics through things like sixel and shaders I'd love to have a browser even if I couldn't do videos. Even if it was like viewing most pages in reader mode.

I'm not sure some big companies would be happy about that though since it likely would mean you could do things like ad blocking more easily. But maybe you could get them on board if you pitched it as a browser for LLMs. Something something it's a native interface for them. ;)

I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough... definitely not of the quality we're seeing elsewhere in the current TUI revolution.

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But.. why? Like I do get the occasional need where it's easier to just see an html page in the terminal, but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks with a huge amount of overhead, over having a real buffer and just writing pixels to it, with actual hardware acceleration?

SSH access over a slow network connection?

Why not proxy the network calls only then and use a real browser?

Use SSH’s dynamic proxy mode (-D) so you have the full browser running locally and only the network traffic running over SSH.

This is enormously better for UI response time and things like compressed files: you only transfer the compressed text, image, audio, or video files rather than the decoded form which can be an order of magnitude larger.

Character based interfaces are just nice, IMHO. The Borland IDE was the pinnacle of dev interfaces IMHO. It updated to have modern language server support etc would be my dream dev environment. It would be cool to see how far a compliant web browser could be taken in text mode. It's really sad that most terminals don't have proper image support, btw.

Edit: A comment here linked to https://www.brow.sh/ It looks amazing.

  > but why would you render to a low-resolution 2D buffer with random character-hacks

Have you used a terminal in the last 5 years? We got graphics and everything now[0]

  > huge amount of overhead

A... terminal... with... large overhead? Surely you're joking. Have you met any gui app? Microsoft word takes a few gigs. Have you seen electron apps like Spotify or slack? My fucking mail client takes over half a gig and neomutt takes almost nothing.

Either you're making numbers up or we live in different realities

  > actual hardware acceleration?

Hardware acceleration has existed for years...

Maybe stop making assumptions and check out what terminals can do. They've come a long way since the 80's. I'd suggest starting with something like ghostty.

[0] https://notcurses.com/

Wouldn't you still be as sluggish as the GUIs you mention since it's HTML5? Is the benefit from only rendering a subset or something? I'm struggling understanding how rendering a page into a terminal is faster than just rendering to a regular window. It just seems like another layer between the browser and the GPU.

I think you have a misunderstanding of the full system. Like you are thinking the GUI is much simpler than it actually is. Conversely I think you're thinking that CLIs are much more complicated. There's a lot more going on than just painting pixels on the screen. Maybe start by asking why vim is several magnitudes less resource intensive then Microsoft word. Then ask the same about neomutt vs Thunderbird vs outlook/Apple Mail

I'm also not sure why you think it's an extra layer between the gpu. Both the browser and terminal emulator are sitting in top of the OS. But also remember if you run headless then your OS doesn't need to load the desktop environment, though you can still use the CLI. At this point clearly the GPU is seeing less, right?

I understand that a GUI is complex, which is why I'm confused about the performance benefit as HTML5 already acts like a GUI. Even if it's a terminal program, it would still need to calculate the layout and handle the DOM to remain compliant, no? A website can be as intensive as Word.

My logic with it being an additional layer is that instead of the browser rendering text to the screen, it would have to speak with the terminal for the terminal to instead render text to the screen. Same goes for rendering graphics. Besides a headless system I don't see much of a benefit to it.

Just less overall overhead

  > A website can be as intensive as Word.

Word has no business being as intensive as it is. It is a bloated piece of garbage.

Browsh [0] - it runs firefox headless, and renders everything to ascii in the terminal

It's glorious

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

> I'm really waiting for the TUI web browser. That would let me live completely in the terminal.

You can already do this, since the 90s: Lynx[1] and w3m[2] have both existed for more than three decades at this point.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3m

ELinks is the TUI browser I've used since .... forever.

https://github.com/rkd77/elinks

Something like ELinks could be created by writing a simple TUI on top of the Servo engine. Then it would be able to handle even complex Web pages full of JavaScript which is a huge chunk of the modern Internet.

I'm sorry, did you even read my comment?

I mentioned those by name...

  >> I know there's some browsers but things like W3M, Lynx, or *links* are... rough...

I believe they wants text browser written specifically in rust, and does not want to touch any software written in filth like c/c++.

Too bad Rust compiles with LLVM (C++) and the stdlib links to glibc (C) then.

I sincerely hope it isn't the reason though, I'm a huge rust fan myself (10years of coding with it already) and I think rust is definitely the future, but that doesn't mean all previous open source foundations should be thrown away.

I use this one pretty often. It’s great. https://chawan.net/

This actually looks pretty reasonable. Thanks! I'll definitely be giving it a try

Chawan is great. Very customizable. Regular updates. Fast. The chaman utility replacing man is also good

Not rust, but check out nimwave: https://github.com/ansiwave/nimwave

Carbonyl looked promising but unfortunately is not maintained anymore: https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

Why would you want to live in a terminal? That's extremely limiting. What you really want is Emacs. Emacs has both a TUI web browser (EWW) and info browser already. You can even run vim in Emacs if you want, either the "real" (and inferior) thing via vterm, or use evil mode or another modal mode for Emacs like god mode.

I wanted to like modal editing in Emacs. But I had to come to terms with the fact that it's always going to be a kludge. Boon is the best I've seen it get, but when I wanted to improve it, I realized it would be less work over the long run to just make my own text editor, though that's mostly because my chosen language, ruby, just doesn't have very good tooling yet.

If you're willing to live in elisp, Emacs is amazing. I'm not, I'm always going to want to do it with ruby, and well, Emacs doesn't let you do that.

Probably not as limited as you think

https://notcurses.com/

the cursive tui library does some html rendering

https://sr.ht/~ireas/cursive-markup-rs/

the whole cursive library strikes me as very html-like in layout

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