Show HN: Gridland: make terminal apps that also run in the browser

93 points by rothific a day ago on hackernews | 13 comments

kamens | 22 hours ago

I love this. It needs to exist because it's fun.

[OP] rothific | 22 hours ago

Thank you! I'm glad you think so. It's all about fun.

theturtletalks | 20 hours ago

Can I replace xterm.js with this?

[OP] rothific | 20 hours ago

Yes (if you're also down to use React)

theturtletalks | 19 hours ago

Cool I’ll try it out. I recently replaced xterm with Ghostty-web for my terminal in the browser app, but this looks even better. I’m using Next.js and I see you have an example.

[OP] rothific | 19 hours ago

Nice! I made a proof-of-concept of using Ink + Ghostty Web a few months back - we didn't end up merging it, but it's still an interesting thing that's possible. I think Ghostty Web is also has tons of potential.

https://github.com/cjroth/ink-web/pull/1

Very nice

Could I use OpenTUI Core with this?

I'd like to replace the hero at https://blisswriter.app with the actual app

[OP] rothific | 19 hours ago

You should be able to. We forked OpenTUI in order to avoid having to shim a bunch of native stuff. I'd like to make it compatible - email me at hi@cjroth.com if you find a way or want any help making it work
Thanks. Will be a while before I could give this a shot...

rablackburn | 16 hours ago

> Gridland is the successor to Ink Web (ink-web.dev) which is the same concept, but using Ink + xterm.js. After building Ink Web, we continued experimenting and found that using OpenTUI and a canvas renderer performed better with less flickering and nearly instant load times.

Ah, I was wondering how this was different to xterm.js embedded in a page. It's just the performance angle? I've been teaching the kids programming from the terminal and I've been planning to make the jump from the terminal to a terminal in the browser as we hit graphical limitations (and as they want to be able to share their games). I'll take it for a spin.

(and if nothing else, I'm going to steal that ripple effect for them ;) )*

* obligatory https://xkcd.com/541/

[OP] rothific | 16 hours ago

Yep, mainly performance - specifically page load time (near instant for Gridland vs ~2-3s for Ink Web). The other issue was flickering. Tbh rendering directly into a canvas is just a better approach and OpenTUI's architect is more modern.

I love that xkcd, I never know what to do, so I'll just :))

curious1008 | 12 hours ago

This is really cool — the "try before install" problem is real for terminal apps.

I built a terminal collaboration tool and one of the hardest parts of getting my friends to try it is that they have to install a binary and set up tmux before they can even see what it looks like. A browser preview would completely change that.

Do you have plans for WebSocket support in the browser runtime? Would be interesting to see if real-time features (like live chat or presence indicators) could work in the browser version too.

[OP] rothific | 4 hours ago

Websockets would work great actually! Basically anything would work as long as you don't use any node or bun specific imports. For file systems you could also use something like this https://github.com/isomorphic-git/lightning-fs

I'm glad you think the try before install scenario makes sense - I think this is definitely the main use case.