Software
Inspired by TempleOS, this terminal emulator is just about as bonkers
When you think of a terminal emulator, you imagine a command line interface filled with ASCII text and a prompt. However, one developer has reimagined the experience to include inline 3D objects and image support.
Dubbed Ratty by its creator Orhun Parmaksiz for its 3D spinning rat cursor, the terminal window itself is a 3D canvas that supports sprites and 3D models, can render 3D drawings in real time, and even includes its own graphics protocol.
“Terminal emulators are a big part of our daily lives as developers but yet we are not making enough innovations in that space,” Parmaksiz told The Register in an email. “With Ratty I hope to inspire others to experiment with terminals and push the limits of what they can do.”
Parmaksiz wrote in his blog post introducing Ratty that he accomplished the whole thing using his own Rust terminal interface library, Ratatui, along with the Bevy game engine, also built with Rust. The aforementioned Ratty Graphics Protocol was created in order to register 3D assets and place them in an anchored terminal cell space.
“Ratty separates terminal emulation from presentation: one side handles PTY I/O and terminal parsing, while the other turns the result into a GPU-rendered 2D or 3D scene,” Parmaksiz explained. “This allows for a lot of flexibility in how the terminal output is displayed (e.g. you can warp the whole damn thing).”
Ratatui ends up serving as the terminal rendering layer, Parmaksiz explained, taking whatever the terminal state is, rebuilding it in its own buffer, and rendering said buffer onto a texture that is then rendered via Bevy.
Given its design, be forewarned if you try to install and run Ratty: It’s going to eat up a lot of memory since it’s running a game engine.
“I know, sacrificing 300 MB of RAM just to run a terminal emulator is a lot,” Parmaksiz said. “But everything comes with a cost, especially the spinning rat cursor.”
Building the fourth temple
Parmaksiz’s desire to push the limits of terminal emulators past their logical limits didn’t come from nowhere – he actually got inspiration from a source that some grey-hairs in the tech community might have been reminded of at the very beginning of this story: TempleOS.
For those unfamiliar with TempleOS, it’s an operating system that was developed by the late Terry Davis, a schizophrenic, and arguably genius, software developer who believed he was building the OS at the command of God to serve as a digital Jewish Third Temple.
Using TempleOS is an exercise in frustration given its confusing interface, not to mention deliberate constraints (Davis believed its 640×480 desktop, 16-color display, single-voice audio and other features were part of God’s commandment), but it also included a fascinating capability not seen in other OSes: first-class, insertable sprites on the command line.
“I was blown away by the creativity and passion behind it,” Parmaksiz told us of TempleOS, noting that 3D command line sprites in the OS were his inspiration for Ratty. “I wanted to see how adopting that to a modern-day terminal emulator would look like and experimented with a couple of other things while I was at it. I’m super happy with the result!”
Parmaksiz told us that a number of people instantly caught on to the TempleOS inspiration, and that the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. That said, he also admitted that most people who’ve used it have been scratching their heads over an actual use case.
“I think this will also clarify itself if we give it more time,” Parmaksiz said in his email. “I mean… I really would like to see a full-fledged CAD program in the terminal built with Ratty Graphical Protocol at some point!”
Whether that’ll ever happen remains to be seen – this is purely a fun project for now and Parmaksiz isn’t even sure it’s in his personal time budget to continue to maintain.
“I’m just testing the waters for now, but the reception has been amazing so far. I would be happy to continue development if people start using Ratty and start developing cool things with it,” Parmaksiz said, noting that the code is open and he’d be thrilled if others contributed.
Parmaksiz has developed a Ratatui widget that enables devs to build applications that run in Ratty, like a temple runner knockoff.
“My ultimate goal with Ratty is to explore the possibilities of what a terminal can be and inspire new ideas and projects in the terminal space,” Parmaksiz wrote in his blog post. “I believe these kinds of experiments are where creativity is born and I hope to spark some ideas for the future of terminals.” ®
