Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

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oorhunp_ about 4 hours ago 73 commentsRead Article on ratty-term.org

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Discussion (73 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

pjmlp•about 3 hours 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

steezeburger•24 minutes ago

That's not 3d

pocksuppet•about 3 hours ago

Or TempleOS.

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

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

nurettin•9 minutes ago

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

Onavo•about 2 hours ago

That was a work of art. Also Oberon.

em-bee•40 minutes ago

and plan9

also smalltalk

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

whywhywhywhy•about 2 hours ago

>work of art

more like theopneustos

jszymborski•about 1 hour ago

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

Sharlin•about 1 hour ago

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.

CTDOCodebases•about 2 hours ago

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

That had me in stitches.

noelwelsh•about 2 hours ago

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/

panki27•6 minutes ago

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

joouha•17 minutes ago

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

bcjdjsndon•about 2 hours ago

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

ch4s3•about 1 hour ago

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

Wololooo•about 2 hours ago

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...

alias_neo•about 2 hours ago

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.

noelwelsh•about 1 hour ago

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

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

calvinmorrison•about 1 hour ago

You can do this with thumbnails using sixels already

kjs3•20 minutes ago

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

the_other•about 2 hours ago

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.

miah_•about 1 hour ago

At that point you've re-invented emacs.

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

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.

sublinear•about 2 hours ago

> 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.

sigseg1v•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

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

Is that what you're looking for?

jetbalsa•about 1 hour ago

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

amelius•about 3 hours ago

Terminal is slowly becoming a full featured web browser.

iugtmkbdfil834•about 3 hours 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

microflash•about 2 hours ago

Or Terminal is already a full featured web browser?

https://hyper.is/

tekla•about 1 hour ago

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

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

EMM_386•about 1 hour ago

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.

shevy-java•about 3 hours ago

And rightfully so! \o/

iugtmkbdfil834•about 3 hours ago

Rip Terry. May you never be forgotten.

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

liamwire•about 1 hour ago

You had me at spinning rat cursor

pelagicAustral•about 3 hours ago

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

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

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

sevenzero•about 3 hours ago

This is exactly what I thought as well.

lackoftactics•about 1 hour ago

Hantavirus inspired?

xrd•about 1 hour ago

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

basilikum•about 3 hours 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

mohamedkoubaa•about 2 hours ago

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

arkwin•about 2 hours ago

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

randusername•about 1 hour ago

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.

silon42•about 3 hours ago

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

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

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

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

sgt•about 1 hour ago

How do I enter zoom mode or pan mode?

darkwater•about 2 hours ago

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

2ndorderthought•about 3 hours ago

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

panzi•about 3 hours ago

What use cases do you see?

2ndorderthought•about 2 hours ago

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

a96•about 2 hours ago

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

drob518•about 2 hours 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.

herrj•12 minutes ago

pranking your co-workers

jayGlow•about 1 hour ago

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

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

avaer•about 2 hours ago

Game development.

whywhywhywhy•about 2 hours ago

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

voidUpdate•about 3 hours 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/

olivierestsage•about 1 hour ago

In a world of slop, one truly noble project emerges

neomantra•about 3 hours ago

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....

kokey•5 minutes ago

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

BaardFigur•about 1 hour ago

Reminds me of TempleOS

shevy-java•about 3 hours 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•about 2 hours 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.

anthk•about 2 hours ago

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.

kjs3•15 minutes ago

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Lucasoato•about 3 hours ago

Imagine this with VR dev environments!

lioeters•about 1 hour ago

> 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.

nickcageinacage•about 2 hours ago

so cool. well done

iugtmkbdfil834•about 3 hours ago

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

rullelito•about 2 hours ago

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