Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics | Hacker News Reader

Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

ratty-term.org

678 pointsorhunp_245 comments

A couple of comments here mention using this in VR. Fwiw, years back I played a bit with shallow-3D UIs for software dev. Shallow like within a few cm of a laptop display, to minimize VAC eye strain for all-day use. Think more being able to layer and draw in color, but in 3D, rather than waving arms in a room.

The 3D can be wiggle 3D, or perspective from webcam head/eye tracking, or stereo from shutter glasses, or XR HMDs. Wiggle is easiest - just move the object orientation back and forth. Cute but distracting. Well, cross/parallel-eye gaze is easier, but limited - ok for little UI test swatches. Perspective is more subtle, less intrusive. Can be simple with a head tracker driving a single orientation, or go all in with eye pose (for distance) and window locations, to do an accurate 3D render. App stereo pairs can be "I give you two windows Left/Right-eye", or "alternating L/R view, labeled/synced/polled". Other possibilities. Many of these need window system/manager/desktop support. I found a lot of leverage in using a stack of electron and X.

It's fun to displace text in 3D. Like colorization, but more so. And if you don't mind a cluttered appearance, you can add secondary information layers segregated by depth. And... etc. Emacs with characters-have-a-depth finally gets you something LispMs didn't have. Fun aside, to explore possibilities with code text, with anything not inherently 3D, far easier to prototype UX with fg/bg colors, fonts, unicode, and animation. Or in browser, overlaid divs and transparent 2D/3D canvases.

I have a working fully 3D glyph based text rendering system I can't seem to get people to look at.

It's this. Every character is a 3d placed quad, instanced rendered, so you get tens of millions and then some. They are individually addressable and mutable like any polygon. I use it to render entire GitHub repos in one go. I have two versions, native Apple and web. Web has the basics of an ide setup. Would love insight or thoughts.

https://ivanlugo.dev/ide

it opens source files in an unreadable small size, presumably to fir the whole file into the window. i can zoom in, but i can't properly scroll around or select text. and i don't see the benefit of using 3d here. it doesn't seem useful.

Two things, one is wrote, the other is direct: Thank you, sincerely, an immeasurably appreciative amount for trying something new, sharing your time and opinion, and being honest with it. This is how we become better tool builders and engineers: different perspectives, different ways of thinking, and honesty with others. Again - thank you.

For you: You're probably right about "not seeming useful", but I do wanna gently nudge you toward what this is a proof of concept about again. Most folks look at this like it's a bigger, flatter emacs/vim/Sublime/VSCode or whatever. I do support editing in my current workbranch, as well as command-based selection, but most of the work spins out because the tool is half "adopt what tools are useful to an interactive development environment of today" and "allow the display of the canvas to overlap with the spatial relationships of directories, files, and colocation to help generate mental mappings of a code space".

These things have often been in conflict, and years (decades) of prior art show this. This is my attempt at it, and since it's my 3rd attempt in twice as many years to make it work in a new environment, you're hitting this particular instance's walls. Would love more feedback or questions!

the question i am interested in is "what is your vision?". what problem are you trying to solve?

you mention "spatial relationships of directories, files, and colocation to help generate mental mappings of a code space" which i guess is the ability to zoom out and get a visual representation of the relationship as opposed to just looking at a directory tree. that makes sense. i have seen different attempts at doing that, some better than others. to make that practical however i guess it would help to be able to edit text in that space too. zoom in to one column, allow scrolling to jump from one column to the next. and then parse the code, add highlighting, connect function calls. imagine zooming out from a selected function and suddenly you get arrows from all over the codebase where that function is referenced to visualize the relationship.

as far as the proof of concept goes it shows that there are no performance issues this way (at least as far my brief test has shown), now the next step is probably to make it work practically. and for that i guess the key feature is to quickly jump around in the code.

i hope this is useful. i am less interested in IDEs myself so i looked just out of curiosity. my primary interest is in a more powerful commandline tool/terminal that can visualize files and data.

I opened and it said to use a repo tab. There are no tabs so I pushed a button. It had a list with Linux so I clicked that. It redirected to a 404 page on github and I gave up.

I don’t know what this is supposed to do, let alone how to use it. But I looked at it for you!

There's a menu bar on the left in which the third option is labelled repository, no?

firefox 150 here.

Not on mobile safari

For you: The 'tab' layout is pretty atrocious even as a one-shot run through of fitting most of the control areas to mobile and desktop screens. It's not easy, and a lot of 'feature' bloat makes it worse. Knowing what your first-time drop in was like and how you found that link is incredibly useful insight, and I'll be updating the layouts more to accompany first timers and instructions like the original source material I'm rebuilding from on the Apple side.

looked at it. I don't think it works, as the other person said.

It works.

Second: Thanks for the confirmation! If you've got any thoughts or feedback, please be as direct as you'd like - I've already started cleaning up some of the more 'user friendly' notes I've been neglecting in an effort to stick to the internals.

Second up: I'd love some input as to what didn't work! Did a shader fail to load? Desktop or mobile? Did you load a repository that was too large and OOM'd out in the browser? Did it cause your monitor to spin 360 degrees and speak tongues? Do tell!

Is there a reliable way to pan around? Middle click + drag doesn't pan if my screen is covered by an object, it just moves the object itself. Scrollwheel pans up and down but I can't figure out how to go left and right. The minimap is too coarse - when I'm zoomed in close enough to read any text, very tiny movements of my mouse on the minimap pan around massively, too massively to be useful.

Ok, now for you: Interaction is absolutely not ideal. I've tried a number of 'defaults' across the years and across platforms, and this isn't the one I want to settle on. At the moment, the 'shortcuts' and bindings page is also a bit out of date, but you can change scroll / zoom directions with keyboard modifiers, and they keyboard itself (if on a device that has one) can be used to navigate around. Agreed that scaled interaction is the trick to this when reading individual files, and that's why I have tried to allow this to be configurable and dynamic while testing. Some people want big picture motions first to get a mental map, some want to focus on small groups of individual files to read. I'll be taking this into account!

> I use it to render entire GitHub repos in one go

Nifty.

Some scattered thoughts...

First-time visitors easily bounce away if there's friction. My experience was: After reloading the page to reread the "load a repo" message, it took a search to find it. Two-fingers unexpectedly panned not zoomed. I consulted the keyboard shortcuts found earlier. My scroll panned. Keys zoomed, but speed was limited by key autorepeat. No response when clicking on shortcuts, suggesting they can't be changed. I eventually noticed shift-two-finger zoomed.

So perhaps add an initial popup, as with browser games, giving basic orientation/keys? And perhaps have some default repo already loaded?

Is antialiasing turned off? The text is less readable than I'd expect, and there's flicker during zoom.

I didn't find the usual github-icon link to the repo. Add it?

Perhaps try google/bing maps-like zooming towards cursor location, rather than always towards center?

Perhaps clamp zoom-out and scroll so one can't reach no-text-visible blank black screen? Perhaps clamp zoom-in earlier, so "slam inward" stops short of the current one-line-high screen?

Clicking README.md brings up a 3 column render, which is too small to read on my screen without further zooming. I'm unclear on what I'd like instead.

A big picture observation. Early phone apps did skeuomorphic UIs - a calendar app might render a wire binder spine, and animate paper page turning, with sound effects. It helped onboard a user population unfamiliar with phones. We don't do that anymore. It'd be silly. Most VR UIs seem to me skeuomorphic transients. Why hobble ourselves by unnecessarily importing the severe constraints of a Euclidean physical world?

So for example, file presentation might combine content-aware and location based scaling. A README might show up with the header lines enlarged, as in some md editors, and perhaps with fisheye-like distortion (when at the top, the top is rendered normally, but with increasing shrink below). Or mix in outliner-like expand/collapse. And so on. Whatever dynamic geometries are task helpful for the human. Once text colorization is working, it might be fun to work little exercises (make videos?) - with files X and task Y, how might they be most helpfully presented? When skimming agentic markdown as it scrolls by, I keep wishing for a couple of cloud-fast small models that watch it with me, and adjust the text size/color/annotation/etc to guide my attention to notable bits.

In the vein of making functionality easy to explore, perhaps give diff a default pr?

It's neat to see a repo slurped into something like this. Thanks for sharing.

UNIX still trying to catch up with Xerox workstations in the REPL experience, or general Lisp machines for that matter.

Inline graphics from 1981,

https://youtu.be/o4-YnLpLgtk?t=376

Or TempleOS.

That was a work of art. Also Oberon.

>work of art

more like theopneustos

Even Terry Davis wasn't that bold.

Given that Terry described the manic episodes as "a revelation from God" I think theopneustos is an accurate description. It just means "God Breathed" or "Inspired by God"

Oh, yeah that does make sense now that I think about it.

Well he did admit this possibility

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K8IEzXnMYk

and plan9

also smalltalk

we used oberon in one class in university. i don't remember much unfortunately.

People joke about templeos a lot, but it had some really neat ideas (holy-c is a pretty nice language)

It should have been HolyBasic. Mistyping a HolyC indirection in an editor causes the OS to crash.

We would still have an issue with bad POKEs though.

It didn't cause a problem in my Commodore 64. ROM4L

I've dug around the TempleOS codebase a bit, and while it certainly is impressive for a single guy's work, I think there's been an overcorrection where people act like Terry was some hyper genius instead of "a pretty smart guy".

I kind of got the impression that whenever Terry didn't know how to do something, he would just convince himself that that's not what God wanted anyway and stop doing it.

I like that mindset. "This bug is not meant to be solved."

Most of the people we think of geniuses are not smarter than the average smart person, but they persevered more. Terry had the ultimate driver of perseverance: severe mental illness.

I don't think most people actually believe he was one of the smartest people of all time or anything. He was obviously a seriously talented programmer, and impressively so: when you consider the number of humans that can program at all on earth, and then the number that can write a compiler, and a complete operating system/desktop environment/shell/games, while suffering from severe mental illness no less—you end up with a vanishingly small group.

I came here to mention how it reminded me of the sick 3D icons TempleOS had in its terminal

The announcement blog post (https://blog.orhun.dev/introducing-ratty/), which would've been a better submission URL, unsurprisingly says that TempleOS was the direct inspiration of the project.

That's not 3d

The example on the linked video it isn't, correct.

Here is another video, this time with S-PACKAGE used to develop Nintendo 64.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU

Which given the REPL capabilities, you can easily embedd them on it, just like the other video.

Later rebranded as Mirai. I remember playing with a pirated copy of Nichimen Mirai somewhere in 2001 (I think), it looked weirdly Ediacaran in the Cambrian explosion of the late 90s.

So you're saying that the Xerox workstation didn't have inline 3d graphics rendering capabilities? And in fact this isn't an instance of UNIX trying to catch up to Xerox workstations' REPL from yester-decade?

It's also from 2013

But that's not what was relevant to their comment.

"Here's this new thing that can Ⓧ!" "Pfft, Y could do X years ago."

Well, Ⓧ ≠ X. Come on now, we're programmers here.

Just noting how every single part of that was wrong.

I'm actually not sure what you're saying. Are you implying inline 2d graphics are the same as inline 3d graphics? That's what the subtitle of Ratty was about. And that's not what was shown in original comment's video. Why does it matter if it was from 2013? It wasn't showing off the same thing as Ratty.

He was responding to "Inline graphics from 1981"

It is when you use a CRT instead of a flat panel.

that's a poorly chosen counter-complaint. before SGI, symbolics owned the market for 3d graphics. this was a world where you could also just do (create-window), see the window, and get back a handle you could use to draw in it. starting with X10 afterwards for me was like drowning in mud.

I think the original comment is actually a poorly chosen example vs me having a poorly chosen counter-complaint.

Sometimes I really feel we're chasing UX that were solved in the Mother of all Demos (in 1968).

For those who haven't watched it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Agreed.

I like this. No reason the terminal should only support text. Data science notebooks show one way the terminal can evolve. Lots of interesting stuff happening in this space, with Kitty probably being the most aggressive innovator here [1]. I'm not sure there is an overall vision, though.

[1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/protocol-extensions/

Terry A Davis already did this. It was as crazy then as it is now

Obligatory Temple OS unhinged video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o48KzPa42_o

Joking apart, the whole thing was both an exercise in madness and genius. Sometimes I wonder what he would have done if he had not gone crazy. We will never know...

> Sometimes I wonder what he would have done if he had not gone crazy.

At what point do you consider he had "gone crazy" relative to the development of TempleOS? Only when he committed suicide? Shortly before then? Last ____ years of his life?

Without trying to sound insensitive, I'd personally argue the entire OS was the byproduct of a "crazy" individual.

The inspiration may have been all "crazy" but the implementation was still really neat, and it takes a lot of effort and skill to get to the point he did before his death. The thing about people who lose touch with reality is that their efforts to create or express something often make no sense to the rest of us. TempleOS, however, works. Terry create an OS from scratch, an entire new language (or variant of a language) in the form of HolyC, and not only does it all work together in a way that requires no disconnect from reality, it works well for his goals and philosophy.

The entire thing may be the result of a person suffering from schizoaffective disorder, but that person still held a great deal of skill to implement that idea and enough of a touch with the reality of computer hardware to make it happen.

> TempleOS, however, works

But only in 640*480, without networking or usb. Oh and virtual memory is a government conspiracy so expect crashes. He also said the n word a lot

I'm aware. None of that has any bearing on whether or not his grasp on reality was firm enough to create TempleOS.

I took the parent comment to mean, what would Terry have made if he wasn't crazy and didn't make a God-themed novelty OS?

He'd probably be writing poison pill generators for AI, obfuscation tools (in the vein of public key crypto, but using entirely plaintext, in a style similar to Cockney rhyming slang) for social media posting. He was pretty anarchistic and antiestablishment. I'm sure we'd still see that coming through.

The person who built this directly cites Terry as the inspiration.

I wonder if something like this could work for thumbnails in the terminal; I prefer to browse my filesystem from a terminal rather than the point and click file manager typically, and it would be really useful if I could have a grid-style `ls` with terminal based renders of the 3d models (thinking STL/STEP, 3D printing) in that directory. Bonus points if I could preview/rotate the model to inspect it.

You can do this with thumbnails using sixels already

You could probably do something interesting with Tek 4014 emulation, but I think you're right that sixel would be slick.

eza [1] is a step in that direction. It lacks the interactivity, however.

[1]: github.com/eza-community/eza

as a compromise i started using nemo/n̶a̶u̶t̶i̶l̶u̶s̶ with a plugin that puts a terminal at the bottom of each tab. so i have a graphical view of the terminal but a commandline in the same folder right next to it. the two don't interact other than being able drag and drop filenames from the filemanager into the terminal, so it is far from what we really want, but it's a small start.

Do you mind sharing a little more about the plugin you use? A quick online search wasn't very helpful to me but I've also been hoping for something like this.

i am using the nemo filemanager which is a fork of an older version of nautilus. https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo-extensions

fedora has a package for it. just installing it will make the plugin available so it can be activated within nemo preferences.

one problem is that common terminal shortcuts are captured by the filemanager. ctrl-c for example will copy a file from the file manager and not kill a process in the terminal if you have something selected (there is no shortcut to unselect everything (you can do ctrl-a,shift-ctrl-i (select all/invert selection))).

if any shortcuts bother you, these keys can be changed in ~/.gnome2/accels/nemo

i wish the shortcuts would work based on where your focus is.

as for nautilus it appears that it no longer supports the APIs needed for the terminal: https://github.com/flozz/nautilus-terminal

dolphin also supports builtin terminal, but it shares the same terminal between all tabs which is a bit less convenient. it handles control keys a bit better though.

despite its shortcoming this integration has changed the way i work and got me interested in exploring better solutions.

now when i want to run a command i go to the right tab, the visual presentation of the contents tell me that i am in the right directory, and i can run the command in the right context.

i do a lot of stuff in the terminal, but i prefer a visual orientation. i normally use tmux everywhere, and i have a tmux window open for each directory that i operate in. but ls or terminal file managers are not visual/interactive enough. sorting for example depends on the use case. in a file manager i can have different tabs sorted as i like, in tmux i would have to remember the right ls command and then still don't see everything i need, especially selecting multiple files for opening at once in the terminal is a lot of typing, whereas in the file manager it is a few clicks. a separate terminal and file manager window would make it difficult to keep the two connected. (although a window manager feature that allows me to connect windows would be cool)

yazi[0] seems to be able to display images iirc. Does it work for your use-case, hope this helps ya!

[0]: https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi

Mix this 3d graphics, with data science notebooks, with local LLMs, and perhaps an integrated coding harness, with visibility over your personal data and you’d have something absurdly good.

This might overtake “a haiku+macOS mashup” as my idealised computing future.

At that point you've re-invented emacs.

Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming states that any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

I like rtm's corollary: "... including Common Lisp"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

well, almost. if emacs offers a graphical file manager i'll consider using it. this seems to be a start: https://github.com/emacs-eaf/eaf-file-manager. the file manager needs to also integrate with a terminal though so i can run unix commands in the same directory. and it needs to support mouse-based operations too. finally, and that's the real kicker, i'd like a better integration of the terminal output and the graphical display by supporting the passing of structured data that the display knows how to handle without terminal escape codes. those need to go away. (which is why sixels are not a solution either)

I’m so sorry to say this but what you want is vscode

That, or eshell and emacs-ipython-notebook

you got a point with the notebook, except both it and vscode are for programmers. i want the same for non-programmers for the unix commandline. i looked at jupyter-qtnotebook. it can display graphics inline. now instead of a repl for programming code i want to enter unix commands and display their output with graphics.

> push the state of terminal emulators forward

What's overlooked here are the insane political and economic forces that were required to get anywhere close to the (sort of!) consistent implementation of plain text we have today. These projects try to piggyback off that success yet only contribute back harm. We have standards for a reason.

I'm not saying people can't have fun, but don't try to start a cyberpunk-inspired revolution and then blame the side effects of groupthink and software rot on everyone else when it goes sideways.

Exactly this. They are slowly turning the terminal into a web browser, just for attention. We already have web browsers. If you want something at the midpoint, make it, but please don’t call it a terminal & destroy one of the few non-trojan-horse standards that we have left.

No evolution necessary! With my project, euporie [1], you can have use your data science notebooks with graphical image outputs, HTML, LaTeX, etc, all in the terminal.

[1] https://github.com/joouha/euporie

This is such an amazing project. I find it so awesome that I can bump on such projects (and their creators, Hi!) on hackernews.

I wish to ask a question if I may (and as such pardon my ignorance on jupyter kernel, I don't know much about it and I hope you can tell me more about it :-D)

but my question is, is there a way to swap the jupyter kernel within euphorie to something else more minimalist?

And when you run a project with ssh, there are ways to give access to other users with user:password if I may ask?

I didn't know that there were ways to run jupyter kernels in terminal, I don't know when I might need it but I am prepared with this information now, this feels so nice to me, thanks for making it!!

This is like a checklist of a thing I didn't know that I needed/existed but the second I know that it has existed, it feels like my mind has checked it off and just a satisfaction from knowing projects like these existing.

(I think in some sense this is a bit of same reaction to me on Ratty too), Its just so good seeing projects in these spaces :-D

Edit: just remembered the one time I think I was using some websites which gave me jupyter and then I tried to use browsh to run jupyter to run jupyter in terminal so that it can be controlled by terminal but it had some issues and I wasn't able to run it.

I also wish to ask if there is a way to sign in to jupyter instance like that itself perhaps? (IIRC it was a jupyterhub instance)

> is there a way to swap the jupyter kernel within euphorie to something else more minimalist?

You can use euporie-console for a REPL-like terminal experience (still with rich outputs) if you don't want the full notebook experience.

You can also select the `local-python` kernel in euporie to run code using the local Python interpretor which runs euporie, instead of connecting to a Jupyter kernel.

> And when you run a project with ssh, there are ways to give access to other users with user:password if I may ask?

> I also wish to ask if there is a way to sign in to jupyter instance like that itself perhaps?

euporie-hub supports spawning notebook instances for connected users, but I haven't implemented collaborative editing like JupyterLab supports (yet). I believe that jpterm [1] might support this.

[1] https://github.com/davidbrochart/jpterm

incredible work!!

You mention using this over ssh. Is there any way to get this working in tmux or anything similar by any chance? Or is the idea that euporie itself is acting like a multiplexer?

You can absolutely run euporie in tmux. It's useful to do so when using long running notebooks over SSH, so you can disconnect and reconnect later.

How does that work with all the kitty terminal protocol image stuff if I have plots to display?

tmux now supports sixel graphics, so you can use that instead if running euporie in tmux

Awesome. Can this work with Julia/Pluto.jl?

Yes - you need to use the IJulia kernel: https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl

that looks awesome (btw: a demo video would be nice, i could not find any), but it's not solving the problem terminals are generally used for.

i want something like jupyter but for unix shells, not for programming languages. and, i don't want it in the terminal, i want it to be the terminal, that is, i want to get rid of terminal escape codes that you currently need to make this work.

think about it like this: in jupyter you have pieces of code and their output. you change the code, it changes the output.

a unix shell version of this would be a commandline, and its output which would be text or an image or whatever the commandline produced. every output box would be itself a terminal if the output is text. but that's only necessary to support programs that produce terminal output. new programs could produce structured data that this jupyter for shells could interpret and display directly.

I managed to get `pyvista` to render arbitrary 3D shapes directly to the terminal using kitty graphics. It's a giant hack, only way to make it performant is using shm.

https://git.theresno.cloud/panki/kglobe

ipython-qtconsole seems very underappreciated to me.

It doesn't, that is an issue with how UNIX terminals came to be, and the whole backwards compatibility pretending that an HiDPi screen is a VT 100.

Terminals on other operating systems that grew up with a framebuffer don't have this limitation.

Or for that matter, the magic that was a Tektronix storage scope terminal (and compatibles. At school there was a vt10x that had been modified to act like a Tek 4014 by some third party).

Seems... really good?!

Questions:

- rendering capabilities of this seem like it should also be able to handle 2d well, or am I mistaken? every solution I see for getting high quality 2d images or rasterization in terminal is all pretty bad. Could this do better than other solutions or is there a fundamental limit being hit somewhere?

- What happens with ssh given that this is gpu accelerated?

There are quite a few GPU powered terminal emulators around already.

Is that what you're looking for?

I think they are looking for full 2d graphics, bitmaps, sprites and the likes.

The kitty graphics protocol is pretty good. Ghostty implements it fully.

Terminal is slowly becoming a full featured web browser.

Always has been meme incoming. Also, more seriously, the purpose of a tool is to do a job. The question becomes whether this tool can be made useful. I.. honestly don't know, but I will be finding out soon:D

And rightfully so! \o/

Or Terminal is already a full featured web browser?

https://hyper.is/

Isn't there a Terminal that renders everything with React?

Super slow, but I guess thats what web devs want.

There are terminal libraries that do this:

https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

Which is what Claude Code CLI uses (or was using?) and it caused many issues such as flickering, thrashing, and latency.

Do you one better.

Rendered as instanced quads in 3d space. Tens of millions at >60fps, and an entire class of "grid based text rendering" evaporates.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/glyph3d-js

i have been waiting for this.

It's inevitable

You asked for it…

https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

Heh that's ... truly the worst of both worlds.

Or firefox flavoured https://www.brow.sh/

It does, yeah.

You know, Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn't even notice.

Rip Terry. May you never be forgotten.

edit: But your spirit lives on ( based on the project:D )

As do his sprites.

It's very interesting to learn about the newly proposed glyph protocol [1] in the linked blog post. I was bemoaning the lack of exactly this here about 6 months ago [2]!

[1] https://rapha.land/introducing-glyph-protocol-for-terminals/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45805072

Oh hey, that's a nice idea! Unlike some of the terminal projects I've seen recently, it addresses a problem without entirely reinventing the idea of what terminals can do.

Agreed, glyphs are the key

https://github.com/tikimcfee/glyph3d-js

The idea that every application should ship their own glyphs because some proprietary systems do not have normal fonts, is not great. Fix the terminal instead.

Also, if you want advanced GUI with icons, maybe you should just write a GUI app.

As for shipping custom icons, this is not very bright idea as well. If you switch between several applications on one terminal, then one application can redefine glyphs from another application. Also, when the application terminates, nobody cleans up its glyphs. Also, this increases attack surface because font standards are pretty complicated and one will be able to attack the system by just providing a glyph. We already have programs that can break the terminal, which should never happen.

Also, as for icons, I find emoji characters too distracting (and too large). They stand out too much and take away user's attention, breaking any visual hierarchy. The icons in terminal should be monochrome, and with thin lines, so that they do not distract you from the text and its structure.

I'm specifically interested in querying for support of particular glyphs (e.g. the symbols for legacy computing block), so applications can use a different fallback if it is know that a particular glyph cannot be rendered and will break the interface.

I agree that the addition of sending custom glyphs to the terminal is potentially problematic.

I think this is not an application responsibility. Do you also check which Wayland extensions the system has, and install your own if some are missing?

"Don't worry, all of these dependencies are worth it."

That had me in stitches.

This reminds me of when compiz came out and everyone was like MY WINDOWS ARE ON A CUBE and I NEED WOBBLY WINDOWS.

So anyway, being that guy, I immediately installed it.

I remember those good old days. I had virtualbox running win xp on its dedicated face on the compiz cube. It felt magical to switch between windows and Ubuntu specially with all the compiz animation goodies

You can still have that in KDE Plasma to this day. I have the wobbly windows enabled because they're neat.

Can I really render a 3D rat on my terminal? If I can then I'm sold.

This is exactly what I thought as well.

I saw it this morning on reddit, the I beam was replaced with a spinning rat for the demonstration. It was very cool B)

We are one step closer to the terminal in the movie Hackers, and I am all for it.

This is kinda possible already today with the Kitty graphics protocol, I made a demo here of rendering 3D graphics[1] with kitty. The actual important missing thing (and which ratty seems to also not include) is vsync.

If rendering is not aligned then it's possible for the terminal emulator to read the framebuffer while the application is writing to it, causing visual artifacts.

[1] https://x.com/zack_overflow/status/2035921425341763756?s=20

This is pure Hollywood OS - hackers feverishly entering obscure incantations like “upload virus”…but now with the terminal twisted into a Moebius strip!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kSdvNH1BYQI

Still giving me goosebumps

What would happen when you use `cat` in Ratty then?

You had me at spinning rat cursor

This looks a lot like it'd qualify for a ShowHN. Add "ShowHN: " to the beginning of the title and it should show up in /show

Emojis in a terminal are a step too far for me. This is just... Indulgent.

The question is - why do we still need the terminal abstraction at all?

That’s what I came here to ask. Their demo looks like Compiz back in the day: ok, cool, you have 3d effects, but… why? What does it do for me?

Compiz 3d effects were ultimately a useless gimmick and I predict this is too.

Lack of imagination doesn't mean this isn't innovation.

It's the ability to convey more information in less space.

Top-of-my-head notion: The cursor spins (or changes in another way) to reflect CPU use, or bandwidth use, instead of taking up space elsewhere on the screen.

The same was said about Compiz, but it turned out to be a passing gimmick that looked flashy but didn’t really add anything. Sure you could always make up reasons why it’s useful, I remember the same about Compiz, but… is it really? I could be proven wrong, of course, but it hasn’t been demonstrated yet.

It’s a solution in search of a problem. OP should have presented it with a real use case or benefit, not just flashy graphics, if it’s meant to be anything other than a fun oddity (which, to be fair, is perfectly fine).

It’s a solution in search of a problem.

So were iPods.

I would argue that a proper REPL is much better.

The terminal is keystroke-driven. It's character-selectable. It's reliable in a way that the GUI is not. When I drop frames, I can still enter the commands to rescue myself with some assurance they'll be interpreted, eventually.

I agree, a REPL isn't Unixy in the streams of text kind of way... or is it?

Let me add more! PIPES.

It's a bit more abstract and useful than "character-selectable" when viewed at the byte-level abstraction.

The ability to chain together utilities with no complicated data structures is extremely flexible. One of my favorite current use-cases is using FFmpeg to process RTSP streams that send output (e.g. high quality stream for recording, low quality low FPS for processing, max quality low FPS for stills, etc) to separate file descriptors. FFmpeg doesn't care whats on the other end (e.g. redirect to file, read via Python, etc) due to these lovely abstractions.

Reliability translates directly to scriptability. Yes, you can create monsters, but through the use of sub-shells and pipes I think it's the fastest, cheapest, most concise way to pull off some really cool multiprocessing tricks.

> The question is - why do we still need the terminal abstraction at all?

Because nobody is willing to put in the work to create a GUI toolkit that doesn't suck ass.

It's not that people want the "terminal abstraction". What people want is "Put <thing> on screen without me needing a PhD in graphics programming." That's why the dominant desktop interface paradigms have become TUIs and a Browser-In-A-Trenchcoat.

Cool.

Seriously, though, when are we going to see the convergence of terminals and GUI remoting protocols? People have already departed far from Unix pipeline utilities. "TUI" programs are already GUIs in disguise. Why keep pretending that the terminal (as used by TUI programs) is a different kind of thing?

Agreed. Terminals are just addressable glyph tools with programming tools wrapped around it.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/glyph3d-js

If this turns out to exfiltrate all my keys, I will have some explaining to do to my security department.

IMO, next crazy step is for terminal to just have wayland or X11 protocol ? (/s or not?)

someone made an x server that renders to sixel[0]

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45341683

I have been thinking about this for a while. It's not as crazy as it may sound, especially in light of the other comments making a parallel between terminals and notebooks.

A few thoughts:

1. Linux VTs kind of have this feature already: there is the normal buffer, the alternate buffer (that something like htop would draw on), and an IOctl can change them to/from graphics mode.

2. It makes sense for interactivity. Kitty's graphics protocol is quite useful for static shapes, can be abused for animations, but doesn't really cut it for interactivity (say, pan a graph around). Wayland is designed for this.

3. Wayland would be a good fit: isolate each command from another, let them request buffers, but keep control of where to display them, do not update them when off screen, etc.

4. One downside is that terminals excel for one-shot tasks. What's the purpose of the display when you are done with it? Should you kill the process driving it? Due to this, it may make more sense to delegate more features to the terminal emulator (displaying the 3D model, etc). Or maybe just allow the app to temporarily take over the window.

5. Once you have it up and running, have it talk directly to the direct rendering manager. Your "kmscon" is now your compositor / desktop environment. That's a fun thought! Add some basic terminal features like tabs and tiling, and you've inverted the usual setup.

6. One downside is accessibility. I really like that I can copy-paste any part of the interface for reference, "screenshots", etc. It's good for screen readers, too. You lose these advantages by going to Wayland.

7. Another current terminal limitation is fonts. Power line, yazi & other make use of custom fonts for drawing part of the interface, logos, etc. AFAIK there is no good way to query their availability (which is also an issue for color emoji). Custom fonts or a new protocol could be useful, but client apps could draw it themselves if given a surface (that can already do that with the kitty graphics protocol, mind you)

Obviously I am not seriously considering to make such a terminal emulator, but it would be an interesting experiment (heck, maybe something I should try this "vibe coding" with, since I wouldn't want to spend too much time on it).

Outside UNIX world, there is no much to think about, see:

- Atari ST GEM OS

- AmigaDOS

- Smalltalk

- Interlisp-D

- Genera

- Oberon

- MS-DOS (mode 13h and VESA)

- TempleOS

- Mac OS classic

That is how terminals work in OSes that were born with framebuffers instead of teletypes.

It is just another graphical application window on the OS.

I built DeepSteve (https://github.com/deepsteve/deepsteve) with a similar itch but went the other way. Instead of adding graphics to the terminal, I put the terminal in a place that already has graphics.

I kept trying to optimize my terminal layout and realized I could just run my terminals inside of the browser, and let Claude Code write JavaScript in the same browser tab to customize the experience however I want. It's kind of a terrible idea, but it's my terrible idea, and I love it.

Have you ran into any issues with handling inputs? Like how vim Ctrl+P would maybe be intercepted by the browser Ctrl+P shortcut for print.

And have you run into any other issues, maybe like performance?

I feel like web-ified terminals get nerfed pretty hard and I'm not sure if/how people overcome that.

I like the idea of customizing multiplexed terminals with on-the-fly JavaScript, tho.

I haven't seen any performance issues for Claude Code, even when I'm running like 20 in one browser tab and looking at them all at the same time (rendered with xterm.js), but Gemini and OpenCode flicker a lot even if you have one open.

This is so cool I'm sad I can't think of any use case for me

Anybody remember "wobbly windows"? It never sticks.

I have wobbly windows on whenever I use KDE. I like how it gives the movements more momentum, though I have it turned down by a lot so it isn't distracting

Has anyone tried to create 3D fonts? It sounds like a ton of work but might look cool if done correctly.

You could also do really cool text highlights by working with light sources and shader effects

Another feature I'm looking for is smooth scrolling when you hit enter. I've had debates before where they claim it's not possible, that the text must jump one line. But I think it's possible, by shifting the frame buffer up.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/glyph3d-js

If you render your text like a polygon, you get full 3d animations for free.

I was going to comment how it reminded me of TempleOS and the author should look into that, but the accompanying blog post explains how it was inspired by it https://blog.orhun.dev/introducing-ratty/

I actually see some use cases for this. It's one of those should be nonsense projects that somehow isn't.

What use cases do you see?

Yea, gotta be honest here; I’m struggling to see many use cases here other than 3d graphs. I really don’t need a spinning 3d rat cursor.

Game development.

Checking 3d models in a directory inside my terminal to see what's what without opening an application and clicking 100 times.

.. over ssh. In a tmux. After disconnecting and reconnecting.

we could bring back the 3d file browser and render it in the terminal now.

https://youtu.be/dFUlAQZB9Ng?si=3fE-vE8xF5rSVhRR

pranking your co-workers

How long until we have a web browser in a terminal (not just Lynx, but a full on web browser)?

Soon it will just be browsers all the way down.

there was a project that rendered firefox to the terminal through box drawing characters. When libweb is more complete I kinda want to do something similar

Remember when the Claude Code devs claimed that CC is a game engine?

This is a game engine.

I’m not sure why I’d use it, but I enjoyed the visual and loved the brutalist design of the website -- it brought back some fond memories of the good old days.

Make me think of the infamous Unix scene in Jurassic Park.

That was an actual file manager if you didn't know, it was called FSN. Theres a FOSS clone called FSV[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

Hantavirus inspired?

You should know that using a TERMINAL instead of a BROWSER ON THE DANGEROUS INTERNET is the ONLY WAY to *avoid* viruses!

It's funny when terminal emulators add shit like that but search in windows names/content ? nah who needs that

I was gonna comment here "real TempleOS vibes" then the TempleOS logo appeared a moment later in the demo video.

Hah, reminds me of the Quantel broadcast equipment on the 1990s. Why fade to black when you can fade to 3d butterfly!?

This is a great idea. I always wanted KDE konsole to e. g. show images inlined as is. This is possible via magick six:-, but I wanted this to be natively. I want the terminal to be able to work with any data and display it in any way. No need to simulate the 1980s era anymore (except for backwards/legacy support). So great idea here really.

Kitty and several other terminal emulators, have built in graphics display already. IIRC, this is called the kitty protocol, but I might be mistaken.

I did that with Sixels, no Rust needed, no 3D crap, no ad-hoc addons, just old vt340 support in XTerm.

That's how I read images under a remote pubnix with tut using a Mastodon account over plain SSH.

Chafa and XTerm. It works.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I don't have any newsletter, but for Mastodon:

         - Compile tut, it just requires Go, it will run on any modern OS. 
         
         - Login with tut
         
         - Set a 'tview' shell (sh) script as 
           
           #/bin/sh
           chafa  -f sixel --fit-width "$@" | less -r"
            reset 

         - Configure tut, set program=tview in the [media.image] section.

         - Then launch XTerm as 'xterm -ti 340'.  Edit ~/.Xresources so you have nice fonts:

            xterm*background: black
           xterm*foreground: white
           xterm*loginShell: true
           xterm*faceName: Monospace
           xterm*faceSize: 10
           xterm*geometry: 100x32
           xterm*metaSendsEscape: true
 
 
           xterm*decTerminalID: vt340
          xterm*numColorRegisters: 256
          xterm*sixelScrolling: 1
          xterm*sixelScrollsRight: 1

Done. Edit the facesize value to a bigger font if you have a big resolution. Run "xrdb ~/.Xdefaults" to get the changes.

Also, you can run chafa locally with images such as "chafa -f sixel --fit-with foo.img', no need to login into a VPS, of course, it just was a proof of concept that you could see images over SSH. This can be really useful for instance to read graph/plots with Gnuplot or similar tools.

If any, subscribe to T3X's news letter and get some books, as these small tools will pay a lot in near future. No AI crap, small enough to run on some sets, from Statistics to semi-advanced math (even Zenlisp being crap can do complex numbers, and you can adapt the code for instance for S9 so that interpreter Scheme understand complex numbers and a much faster speed).

Yeah, Python+SAGEMATH, CUDA with number crunching and the like. How much are the GPU's, CPU's and SSD's going nowadays in dollars?

"I would like to subscribe to your newsletter" is an old neck-beard way of saying 'I really like what you're doing there' from the before time. The humor probably got lost over the years. But seriously, thanks for sketching that out. I will definitely give it a spin.

I have been waiting for a proper implementation of this since forever. Thanks orhun.

Damn this was really fun to use.

It's like someone crossed an 80s Silicon Graphics workstation with a Vic-20.

I, Beldar, approve.

That's quite cool, visually pleasing to the eye and high on data usage.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." - Jeff Goldblum (OG Jurassic Park)

You can also use the kitty protocol or sixel in modern terminals.

People complain about token limits

Then spend their tokens on abominations like this

Make it make sense

I mean... Why not?

I much prefer seeing tokens used for silly fun stuff, rather than sad get-rich-quick attempts like filling YouTube and Spotify with LLM crap.

Filling GitHub with LLM crap isn't on your list... I wonder why

Happy to include it, plenty of wannabe moneymakers making things worse for the rest there too.

Did this developer complain about token limits?

> Make it make sense

It's not hypocrisy when different people do different things.

People use their tokens, and then complain of limits. Where's the incongruity?

Really fun project! Dude, I spent the last week implementing Kitty Graphics and Clipboard protocols in ghostty-web in the Canvas render.

Then I added WebGL and WebGPU renderers [1], including support for Kitty.

Then I see this this project on a Monday morning... so now I have to implement Ratty Graphics Protocol?!?! [2].

ETA: I looked into this; Ghostty would need patched to support Ratty since Ghostty-Web now defers APC handling there. It would also require pulling in a 3D engine like three.js or otherwise implementing file parsing, lighting, etc. Finally, since local filenames are part of the protocol, a browser would need some file resolver helper, either to get the data over the APC channel or via a URL.

[1] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ghostty-web/tree/nm-webgpu

[2] https://github.com/orhun/ratty/blob/main/protocols/graphics....

I am a bit surprised that I had to look hard for someone to mention Ghostty in the comments.

Your wish is my project.

Glyph rendering in three.js, fully instanced and addressable and positionable instances. Handles tens of millions. Sample app loads up full GitHub repositories in the web in a few seconds.

https://github.com/tikimcfee/glyph3d-js https://ivanlugo.dev/ide

That's pretty handy, thanks for the links. IDE is slick! Given the structure, I think one could make a threejs backend on for ghostty-web. Makes sense if one will pull in more of three.js anyway. I'm adding it to my backlog to explore.

First off, from an internet rando: <3

Second: I would love to offer any assistance during your perusal. Happy to share ideas, what I tried, point out parts of the code that are rough and tumble, whatever helps. I'm in a place where any outside feedback and prodding is precious, so thanks very much for taking a look and keeping it in mind!

Amazing project and the ratatui community is really wholesome :,)

More of this please! Outside the box thinking! Yes and yes!

Here's the bit from the blog post about it:

> When I first got introduced to [TempleOS], I was shocked and impressed by the flashy colors, graphical sprites and uncomprehensible UI. There are so many things that makes it so unique, weird and fascinating at the same time, somehow.... Basically, the command line becomes the direct interface for everything. You can write code, interact with the system and render graphics all in the same place, which is why TempleOS feels so unusual compared to conventional operating systems.

I think this could be a really cool approach. I enjoy tools like Chafa, imgcat, etc but something always feels a little clunky about the separation between text and images. Paradoxically having text and non-text all jumbled up like this feels better somehow.

Well deserved HN #1

I don't know. mixed feelings... but fine

Excited to see others equally inspired by TempleOS’ 3D feature :)

I tried something similar a few months ago that acts more as a library to ratatui than a separate terminal emulator [0].

Was surprised how far one can get using some off the shelf characters like half-block when rasterizing.

The Glyph protocol mentioned in the blog post is interesting … perhaps custom glyphs could help smooth some of the (literal) rough edges from the low effective resolution of a terminals character grid.

[0] https://github.com/limlabs/ratatui-3d

In a world of slop, one truly noble project emerges

How do I enter zoom mode or pan mode?

ctrl + alt + enter

What a twist, having textual window manager within a graphical user interface, and that textual window manager implementing bits of graphics.

You'll soon may be able to implement overlapping graphics windows in TUI within GUI.

This is stupid af.

Was this aided with LLMs or purely for the love of the game? I don't see an AGENTS.md or anything similar in the repo.

Cool... why?

This is gloriously bonkers.

This would be nice in VR

it is the fantastic tool!

last night I was pondering if there was a ghostty plugin that can make my terminal like the opening scroll from a Star Wars movie. Can we make that happen?

Friggin waste of resources

so cool. well done

Dude. Congrats. You actually made a compelling argument to put rust on my machine:P

Expect to see Orhun in here before clicking, not disappointed

temple OS?

Another terminal to murder your battery life

why would you want this?

why wouldn't you want to see your htop output on a moebius strip

Imagine this with VR dev environments!

Terry A. Davis will be proud

Reminds me of TempleOS

So TempleOS was ahead of its time!

My first reaction: "But why?"

My second reaction: "Oh wait is that TempleOS being cited? This is either awesome or terrible."

> inserted 3D objects in the demo above are actually from the TempleOS codebase itself

Brilliant. The dream lives on! This is the best form of paying respects.

It's walking a fine line between madness and genius, and who knows if it'll ever be practical, but more important is the sense of wonder and "fuck yeah" as King Terry expressed so eloquently.

Thanks. I hate it

y tho?

Can anyone explain why this is novel? It seems pretty basic?

1. Not another LLM: +100 points.

2. 3D rat: +100 points.

3. Outdated 80s UI paradigm: +100 points.

4. Uses Rust: +100 points.

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