Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

(ratty-term.org)

96 points | by orhunp_ 2 hours ago ago

26 comments

  • pjmlp 18 minutes ago

    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

    • pocksuppet 17 minutes ago

      Or TempleOS.

      • Onavo 13 minutes ago

        That was a work of art. Also Oberon.

  • sigseg1v an hour ago

    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?

    • berkes 9 minutes ago

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

      Is that what you're looking for?

  • amelius 30 minutes ago

    Terminal is slowly becoming a full featured web browser.

    • iugtmkbdfil834 27 minutes ago

      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

    • shevy-java 19 minutes ago

      And rightfully so! \o/

  • mohamedkoubaa 8 minutes ago

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

  • iugtmkbdfil834 an hour ago

    Rip Terry. May you never be forgotten.

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

  • pelagicAustral an hour ago

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

    • sevenzero an hour ago

      This is exactly what I thought as well.

  • silon42 31 minutes ago

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

  • neomantra an hour ago

    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]. Really fun project!

    [1] https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ghostty-web/tree/nm-webgpu [2] https://github.com/orhun/ratty/blob/main/protocols/graphics....

  • basilikum an hour ago

    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

  • nickcageinacage 8 minutes ago

    so cool. well done

  • 2ndorderthought an hour ago

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

    • panzi 17 minutes ago

      What use cases do you see?

      • 2ndorderthought 3 minutes ago

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

      • drob518 4 minutes ago

        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.

      • avaer 3 minutes ago

        Game development.

  • voidUpdate an hour ago

    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/

  • shevy-java 20 minutes ago

    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.

    • berkes 7 minutes ago

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

  • iugtmkbdfil834 38 minutes ago

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

  • Lucasoato an hour ago

    Imagine this with VR dev environments!