But since we have the Godot game engine at our disposal, we can do some more interesting things, like add an FPS counter, and then subsequently also let people set their preferred FPS (the idea being the potential lower power draw if someone's running it on a laptop on battery power vs someone running it on a desktop with high/native FPS). In its current state, with me using Oh-my-Pi a lot, it's evolving into a terminal workspace that can be used for orchestrating autonomous AI agents by way of dogfooding (or you know, just run herdr inside of gPTY - it's the better orchestrator and just good software - I found it after starting this project, and now I'm finding myself using it a lot).
Also, we're not limited to just terminals. Since we have Godot, we have basically a 2D (and potentially a 3D) canvas to play with. We can already full-screen the app for "zen" mode, no taskbar, no distractions. TUI die-hards can have their media or other apps entirely in terminal panes.
There has been some ground-work on getting Markdowns displayed properly done and I want to work on some kind of Wiki framework for local knowledge-management next, then create more types of panes (think native audio/video on a media pane, that sits alongside your terminal pane), and some simple 2D games (like snake) to prototype. More details are on the ROADMAP.
What's not easy (and probably won't happen) is a browser. Having done a couple of (small) projects using Electron already, the temptation to ditch Godot/Rust (learning curve) did come up (and also the ecosystem, the ease with which I could pull components and use web technologies - development velocity would definitely be higher there). But on the flipside, given all of the available LLM and AI support that we are privileged to have today, I figured the velocity should be comparable depending on how much I leaned on those. And lean I did.
Godot/Rust seemed the better call to me and my intent anyway - going with the 'it's not just the end but the journey that matters' philosophy. So yes, there has been heavy use of LLMs & AI to generate a lot of the code. But I do review and steer actively, not relying solely on vibes, and there's a few bits here & there that have been human authored.
There are definitely a lot of polish and QoL items that need to land to make the end user experience better, but in the meantime, let me know your thoughts and/or concerns!
Repository: https://github.com/godot-pty/gpty
Docs/Blog: https://godot-pty.github.io/gpty/
Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
edit: they also recently created libgodot, which flips the model. Your application owns and controls whatever components you want to pull from Godot. Being open source and relatively legible of a code base you could presumably strip out a lot you don't need.
I'll add that in; maybe defaulted to folded on the README, a gallery of app screens or snippets. I need to spend some time on the UX, but yeah, screenshots (and possibly some sort of an intro video that explains features) is something I should've also added to the README.
It sort of goes over the "why?"/"why now?"; but TLDR; Wanted to use Godot & Rust in personal project(s) (no pressing need for it) I saw Cate & wondered whether I could use this tech. stack to replicate, instead of web tech. So that's where it all started. I know that if you want to live in the terminal, there's tmux and herdr, and I'm not (also can't) compete with them. But I can surface a terminal that then lets TUI folks stay in their preferred apps. The residual why/why now are largely shaped by what I want (feature-wise) to put into the tool.
And the next big feature I want is a personal knowledge management. Maybe it looks like a complex beast; but the core idea driving my features are what I want on a daily basis without switching context as much. Sorry, I know it's not a great answer, bit rambly.
That said, for your browser problem, what if you embed the browser inside of godot? Chromium embedded framework does this. I was able to get this to work for me to see Chrome inside of my godot exported projects. https://github.com/dsh0416/godot-cef I believe this is only for desktop exports though, no html5/mobile builds.
Only downside is you have to use Chromium ;)
* putting a quick note in here-- godot-cef is not my project
The browser is probably a non-issue, more a passing thought now. I definitely do not want to bundle or bring in Chromium. If it was a deal-breaker, I would've just gone the Electron route. Appreciate you sharing your WebView extension though, looks neat!
So many times I see projects here I don’t really need, but I always learn something from their readme and code. A lot of time I learn something I can apply to my project. In this case, I use Node-PTY for my terminal control plane but when I run more than 50 agents, it crashes. Maybe using your pty will let me run more agents.
I haven't performance or load tested, it's on the backlog; so I'd be curious on whether this works for your use-case. And if not, feel free to log an issue!
1. https://alacritty.org/
2. https://blog.fangorn.io/tex-in-terminal
3. https://anvil.fangorn.io/fangorn/huorn-minecraft
4. https://blog.fangorn.io/alacritty-in-godot
C++ coding is just fine. It's not painful. It can be a bit of boilerplate to expose c++ member fields and functions to the rest of the engine but you get some great power out of that. Just use compile your own module right into the engine. Don't use gdnative.
As someone who's codes a lot of c++ in Godot I really am not sure what your talking about here.
SDL isn't even in the same dimension of usability compared to the Godot editor.
Usage has been relatively snappy (could be better, I suppose, I need more time). Definitely not sluggish.
A concern is that RAM usage is on the higher side (this is something I'll look at on the next release).
If most of your problem is 2d window/text stuff, the web browser is probably the best foundation to work with. UI and hud functionality in COTS game engines is light years behind what chromium and friends can do today.
This is something I'm mainly working on it on my free time so figured why not see how far I could push things.
Original intent was just a hobby/side project. As it grew, I thought maybe posting about it would be alright in case people find the idea interesting.
So we get an abundance of (useless) software.
Wildly vibe-coded to the extent that it's more misguided than Doom on a pregnancy test...
Also looking at OP's notes here, there doesn't even seem to be a need for this to exist, "FPS counter" ..? Perhaps, I don't know, fake terminals on a spaceship or something. Yueash...
There's a new one every day posted on r/tmux