If you squint, Godot has a cross platform hardware accelerated GUI. The editor is itself, in a sense, a Godot app and has builds for VR Headsets, Android, web apps, all the usual platforms. The extension api works pretty good too for Rust, and Rust itself has a fantastic cross platform and WASM story. It might be cursed, but it can get complicated stuff out the door and in anyone's hands fast.
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.
Yeah, the README doesn't have screenshots; but the docs site does - https://godot-pty.github.io/gpty/ - 1 for now, but each release's blog entry gets the main app page + one for any salient features.
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.
I've done a lot of things reusing/modifying the internals of alacritty [1] to put terminals in things. TeX in the terminal [2], a terminal in minecraft [3], Alacritty in Godot [4], and not pictured, alacritty in a swift plugin for macos/ios/ipados all at various levels of completion.
Godot as an application platform and not just a game engine is a really interesting idea. Given Godot’s editor is built as a Godot engine game, it has a very rich UI system, and it is pretty easy for agents to work with.
I made an internal GUI tool for company in Godot. It uses GDExtension to interact with OS systems, namely serial/COM ports. Yes, you can make quite good desktop GUI applications in Godot, with mostly its default toolkit!
Also, exploring minified Godot template compilation led to me distributing a 24 MB portable package (10MB zipped). Astonishingly efficient.
Can you add a "why?" / "why now?" section?
Don't be another project that is a bunch of how that is leaving out to explain why it exists or exemplify what classes of problems it unlocks solutions for (applicability).
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.
Appreciate the time you took to point this out. Yes, the docs as they are now are LLM written. It might help a bit more if you can point out to a particular section or file that stands out. If not, no worries, I will plan on doing a manual sweep across all .mds for better (clearer) readability.
Terminals and web browsers are our main UI drivers right, so yeah, it makes sense to have a super app that provides them both in the best way. Embdding a terminal inside a web app is annoying because of Ctrl-W and other issues, and embedding a web broswer inside a terminal is even more weird. So we wind up having Wayland compositors do the work to combine them in one environment.
I tried to do this with a simple wgpu + winit app, servo, and alactitty_terminal, and it kinda worked, but both terminal and web browser rendered poorly.
I tried different terminals and multiplexers for agent development: tty7, Warp, Herdr... Now my favorite is tty7. It does exactly what i wanted from a modern terminal, what Warp should have become.
It feels like Herdr + Warp.
It is fast and has vertical tabs grouped by project, and the tabs are part of the native UI rather than a multiplexer. I also like that it separates the daemon and the GUI - with Warp, I accidentally hit Cmd+Q a few times, which closed all my sessions at once. In tty7, they keep running in the background. Compared to Warp, the SSH experience in tty7 is implemented much better. Also, while I liked Warp is blocks at first, now they get in the way more than they help. Another thing I dislike about Warp is the autocomplete: it inserts a path 3 or 4 levels deep at once instead of one step at a time.
Overall, after working with Warp, Ghostty+Herdr, and tty7, tty7 has felt the most comfortable so far.
tty7 has its drawbacks too - the biggest one for me is the lack of support for switching tabs with `Cmd+Shift+[` and `Cmd+Shift+]`.
Fyne.io in Go also doesn't want to support a browser, but that is a great way to expand mindshare (similar to implementing a solid data grid in a UI toolkit).
While I appreciate the creativity around using a game engine for non gaming applications, this does not seem like a particularly good fit.
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.
Agree on Chrome being top-dog in this space. Electron would've been the easy (pragmatic?) choice. But the design decision was to use Godot and not create yet-another-Chrome-Electron app. It's certainly not pretty to look at in its current state.
This is something I'm mainly working on it on my free time so figured why not see how far I could push things.
yeah, personally i think branching out and using something like a game engine for something like this is a fairly inspired choice. inspired meaning that it literally inspired me to immediately think “oh yeah, there really is a wider universe of UI stuff that can push good fps and not be electron”. so just for that alone i appreciate this project’s existence. :)
i will definitely be curious to see how you find that decision to be working out for you as the project evolves— will definitely be keeping my eye on it! actual refreshing, interesting take!
Godot is a pretty monolithic engine and I don't know if you can really compile it down to a reasonable size for non game use cases. The scripting language is pretty slow and I remember coding in C++ was painful even after 4.0. I think you're better off with Raylib, Bevy or plain SDL.
This is just straight up false. You can compile subsets of the engine even in Godot 3. Godot 4 has made this a first class citizen.
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.
On top of that, if you wanted to godot-rust is a extremely well supported - we've used it extensively and have nothing but praise. There are several other language bindings with varying levels of support too, no need to stick with C++ if that's really their line in the sand.
Thanks, wasn't familiar with these, I'll look into them though the project direction is unlikely to change to swap Godot out. As of now, the binaries are in the 60-80 MB range; so not tiny - but not something I'd consider massive for what it is.
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).
The concepts/reg-ex redirect is how I was imagining the autonomous agent automation. It does need to be fleshed out a bit more, but essentially, it was an easy way to let a process to know what's happening in another process so it could react appropriately. The e2e tests are a good use-case, but not something I've looked into yet (in theory, the framework should hold up for it)
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.
This is such a cursed combination... I really don't understand what you get from Godot that benefits you for building a TTY "multiplexer."
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...
a note about "Doom on a preganancy test". It wasn't actually running on the pregnancy test. It was displayed on the tests 1 color LCD screen, but everything else was different hardware. It was a test of hacking the display and what it was capable of in cheap disposable device, not the processing power of the electronics in the test.
You get continous rendering in a loop instead of updates only when something changes. It's like our laptop batteries are too big and we need to find something to deplete them.
lmao how is this on the front page at the 2 spot? People upvoting based on seeing buzzwords I assume? It's cool that small projects can get recognition here but this is not useful software
jesus christ i don’t get this attitude at all. you do realize that software is like 100x easier to make than it used to be right? the world is severely idea-constrained in a way that it hasn’t been since, what, 1992 with the web? i love robust, “hard problem” engineering more than your average bear, but we are so much further down the alan kay “the right pov is worth 60iq points” road than we have ever been in my lifetime, and this is a very non-obvious, creative mashup of things that i directly found inspiring. not because i think the project is perfect or genius or extremely well-executed or anything like that— because it is a creative mix of things, and we live in an age where we can be exponentially more creative with what kinds of atoms we can smash together than ever before.
Thanks for your honest response. It's okay. At its core, it's a fun hobby/side project, not my day job. And I like it. But I'm realizing maybe this wasn't the platform to post on.
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!
No, this is the platform to post on. You hacked something neat together and posted about it. I really liked how you made it agent first and gave it an MCP server so you can give any agent a tmux like multiplexer to use as subagents.
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.
Thank you for your kind words, that's generally how I see other's projects too.
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!
If you squint, Godot has a cross platform hardware accelerated GUI. The editor is itself, in a sense, a Godot app and has builds for VR Headsets, Android, web apps, all the usual platforms. The extension api works pretty good too for Rust, and Rust itself has a fantastic cross platform and WASM story. It might be cursed, but it can get complicated stuff out the door and in anyone's hands fast.
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.
Just try to remember accessibility concerns.
Surprisingly - if you're using the standard controls - Godot's UI components are fully integrated with AccessKit.
For everything else, https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/full-list/ is a great checklist.
Oh, apparently that came in Godot 4.5. Good to know.
A project without screenshots - I dont know how they expect us to understand unless we read everything
Yeah, the README doesn't have screenshots; but the docs site does - https://godot-pty.github.io/gpty/ - 1 for now, but each release's blog entry gets the main app page + one for any salient features.
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.
I've done a lot of things reusing/modifying the internals of alacritty [1] to put terminals in things. TeX in the terminal [2], a terminal in minecraft [3], Alacritty in Godot [4], and not pictured, alacritty in a swift plugin for macos/ios/ipados all at various levels of completion.
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
Semi-related: I built a Godot plugin that adds a Ghostty-based terminal pane to the Godot editor (https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/5426).
Godot as an application platform and not just a game engine is a really interesting idea. Given Godot’s editor is built as a Godot engine game, it has a very rich UI system, and it is pretty easy for agents to work with.
I made an internal GUI tool for company in Godot. It uses GDExtension to interact with OS systems, namely serial/COM ports. Yes, you can make quite good desktop GUI applications in Godot, with mostly its default toolkit!
Also, exploring minified Godot template compilation led to me distributing a 24 MB portable package (10MB zipped). Astonishingly efficient.
Can you add a "why?" / "why now?" section? Don't be another project that is a bunch of how that is leaving out to explain why it exists or exemplify what classes of problems it unlocks solutions for (applicability).
I had been thinking about that & wrote a blog post last week: https://godot-pty.github.io/gpty/docs/overview/story/
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.
Love to see Godot used creatively beyond games! The terminal is for sure an area that can see innovation, why not!
The documentation is really hard to read. It's full of claudisms and verbosity. I highly recommend you to do a human review on the whole thing.
Appreciate the time you took to point this out. Yes, the docs as they are now are LLM written. It might help a bit more if you can point out to a particular section or file that stands out. If not, no worries, I will plan on doing a manual sweep across all .mds for better (clearer) readability.
Terminals and web browsers are our main UI drivers right, so yeah, it makes sense to have a super app that provides them both in the best way. Embdding a terminal inside a web app is annoying because of Ctrl-W and other issues, and embedding a web broswer inside a terminal is even more weird. So we wind up having Wayland compositors do the work to combine them in one environment.
I tried to do this with a simple wgpu + winit app, servo, and alactitty_terminal, and it kinda worked, but both terminal and web browser rendered poorly.
I tried different terminals and multiplexers for agent development: tty7, Warp, Herdr... Now my favorite is tty7. It does exactly what i wanted from a modern terminal, what Warp should have become.
What would you say was the one (or multiple) killer feature(s) that took you away from herdr/warp/tmux/etc. and towards tty7?
It feels like Herdr + Warp. It is fast and has vertical tabs grouped by project, and the tabs are part of the native UI rather than a multiplexer. I also like that it separates the daemon and the GUI - with Warp, I accidentally hit Cmd+Q a few times, which closed all my sessions at once. In tty7, they keep running in the background. Compared to Warp, the SSH experience in tty7 is implemented much better. Also, while I liked Warp is blocks at first, now they get in the way more than they help. Another thing I dislike about Warp is the autocomplete: it inserts a path 3 or 4 levels deep at once instead of one step at a time.
Overall, after working with Warp, Ghostty+Herdr, and tty7, tty7 has felt the most comfortable so far.
tty7 has its drawbacks too - the biggest one for me is the lack of support for switching tabs with `Cmd+Shift+[` and `Cmd+Shift+]`.
Fyne.io in Go also doesn't want to support a browser, but that is a great way to expand mindshare (similar to implementing a solid data grid in a UI toolkit).
Yeah, I understand their direction/scope. While web-dev is easy; the underlying tech and all the edge cases for web browsers is a huge undertaking.
Godot gets you hardware-accelerated rendering and cross-platform for free. The risk is terminal latency creeping up and making it feel like a game.
Nice multiplexer. How does the pane split handle SIGWINCH when a Rust panic unwinds mid-frame?
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While I appreciate the creativity around using a game engine for non gaming applications, this does not seem like a particularly good fit.
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.
Agree on Chrome being top-dog in this space. Electron would've been the easy (pragmatic?) choice. But the design decision was to use Godot and not create yet-another-Chrome-Electron app. It's certainly not pretty to look at in its current state.
This is something I'm mainly working on it on my free time so figured why not see how far I could push things.
yeah, personally i think branching out and using something like a game engine for something like this is a fairly inspired choice. inspired meaning that it literally inspired me to immediately think “oh yeah, there really is a wider universe of UI stuff that can push good fps and not be electron”. so just for that alone i appreciate this project’s existence. :)
i will definitely be curious to see how you find that decision to be working out for you as the project evolves— will definitely be keeping my eye on it! actual refreshing, interesting take!
Godot is a pretty monolithic engine and I don't know if you can really compile it down to a reasonable size for non game use cases. The scripting language is pretty slow and I remember coding in C++ was painful even after 4.0. I think you're better off with Raylib, Bevy or plain SDL.
This is just straight up false. You can compile subsets of the engine even in Godot 3. Godot 4 has made this a first class citizen.
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.
On top of that, if you wanted to godot-rust is a extremely well supported - we've used it extensively and have nothing but praise. There are several other language bindings with varying levels of support too, no need to stick with C++ if that's really their line in the sand.
Thanks, wasn't familiar with these, I'll look into them though the project direction is unlikely to change to swap Godot out. As of now, the binaries are in the 60-80 MB range; so not tiny - but not something I'd consider massive for what it is.
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).
Is the intended use to improve automation by agents during verification? To make it easier to drive Godot apps during e2e tests, for example?
The concepts/reg-ex redirect is how I was imagining the autonomous agent automation. It does need to be fleshed out a bit more, but essentially, it was an easy way to let a process to know what's happening in another process so it could react appropriately. The e2e tests are a good use-case, but not something I've looked into yet (in theory, the framework should hold up for it)
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.
This is such a cursed combination... I really don't understand what you get from Godot that benefits you for building a TTY "multiplexer."
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...
a note about "Doom on a preganancy test". It wasn't actually running on the pregnancy test. It was displayed on the tests 1 color LCD screen, but everything else was different hardware. It was a test of hacking the display and what it was capable of in cheap disposable device, not the processing power of the electronics in the test.
I went shopping for a 4K OLED pregnancy test with 3 HDMI ports, but they threw me out of the pharmacy
"more misguided than Doom on a pregnancy test" has been added to my lexicon.
> what you get from Godot
You get continous rendering in a loop instead of updates only when something changes. It's like our laptop batteries are too big and we need to find something to deplete them.
AI fanatics love terminal multiplexers.
There's a new one every day posted on r/tmux
It’s like it was designed in a lab to maximize engagement on Reddit.
hammer meet nail
lmao how is this on the front page at the 2 spot? People upvoting based on seeing buzzwords I assume? It's cool that small projects can get recognition here but this is not useful software
There are upvote bots here, so any vibe coded project makes it to the front page.
So we get an abundance of (useless) software.
It's still at the number two spot 30+ minutes later. That's wild.
jesus christ i don’t get this attitude at all. you do realize that software is like 100x easier to make than it used to be right? the world is severely idea-constrained in a way that it hasn’t been since, what, 1992 with the web? i love robust, “hard problem” engineering more than your average bear, but we are so much further down the alan kay “the right pov is worth 60iq points” road than we have ever been in my lifetime, and this is a very non-obvious, creative mashup of things that i directly found inspiring. not because i think the project is perfect or genius or extremely well-executed or anything like that— because it is a creative mix of things, and we live in an age where we can be exponentially more creative with what kinds of atoms we can smash together than ever before.
no idea, my project post moved down asap...a few little upvotes only.
I really liked the interactive app demo on the website. App looks good (features + polish) I have it downloaded, will check it out later tonight!
Oh, thank you!
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Thanks for your honest response. It's okay. At its core, it's a fun hobby/side project, not my day job. And I like it. But I'm realizing maybe this wasn't the platform to post on.
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!
No, this is the platform to post on. You hacked something neat together and posted about it. I really liked how you made it agent first and gave it an MCP server so you can give any agent a tmux like multiplexer to use as subagents.
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.
Thank you for your kind words, that's generally how I see other's projects too.
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!