I've been working on Yetty, a terminal emulator that uses WebGPU to render not just text, but also images, PDFs, plots, and interactive widgets directly in the terminal grid.
The core idea is "cards" – rich content blocks that occupy terminal cells and scroll with your output, similar to Jupyter notebooks but in a proper terminal. You can display a
matplotlib plot, and it scrolls up with your shell history.
What's implemented:
- MSDF font rendering (crisp at any zoom)
- Bitmap glyphs for color emojis
- Shader glyphs for animated spinners
- Cards: images, PDFs, plots, vector graphics (SVG/Lottie), ImGui widgets
- OSC escape sequences and RPC for card creation
- Builds on Linux (macOS/Windows untested but should work)
What's honest:
- Test coverage is limited (we're moving fast)
- Currently builds with Dawn backend only (wgpu-native may not work)
- It's not a daily-driver replacement for your terminal yet
- Documentation is sparse
Built with libvterm, Dawn/WebGPU, FreeType, msdfgen, and GLFW. MIT licensed.
Looking for contributors and feedback. If you've ever wished your terminal could show inline graphics without hacks, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
GitHub: https://github.com/zokrezyl/yetty (https://github.com/zokrezyl/yetty)
zokrezyl|28 days ago