Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

orhunp_ 633 points 209 comments May 11, 2026
ratty-term.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

pelagicAustral

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

voidUpdate

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/

2ndorderthought

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

iugtmkbdfil834

Rip Terry. May you never be forgotten. edit: But your spirit lives on ( based on the project:D )

basilikum

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

sigseg1v

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?

Lucasoato

Imagine this with VR dev environments!

neomantra

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....

iugtmkbdfil834

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

silon42

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

amelius

Terminal is slowly becoming a full featured web browser.

shevy-java

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.

pjmlp

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

nickcageinacage

so cool. well done

mohamedkoubaa

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

noelwelsh

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/

darkwater

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

arkwin

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

CTDOCodebases

"Don't worry, all of these dependencies are worth it." That had me in stitches.

whywhywhywhy

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

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