Terminal Browser

Terminals that support the kitty graphics protocol, including ghostty, kitty, cmux, vscode and many more, allow a program running in a terminal to display pixels in your terminal. We use this capability to display pixels generated by chromium.

We use electrons offscreen rendering API to read pixels generated by chromium directly from the GPU. This allows terminal-browser to render smoothly without dropping any frames.

After the browser engine starts and is displaying pixels in the terminal, it needs to be able to read user input for websites to actually work. terminal-browser listens to mouse clicks, mouse position, and keyboard events from the terminal, and then sends synthetic events to chromium based on that data. For any user input events that are not retrievable from the terminal, we read directly from the operating system using a background swift app to listen for input events (non intrusively). This is what allows terminal-browser to implement smooth scrolling, and listen to trackpad events (websites with infinite canvases work great inside terminal-browser!)