HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the Terminal
Details
- External ID
- 48894572
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the Terminal
- Website domain
- duetbrowser.com
- Launched
- July 13, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 9
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.505973715651135
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
This is a model I’ve been thinking about lately. It demonstrates a pattern that I’m wondering could exist, where terminal applications, BBS-style shared user boards, and other expressions of creativity and sharing are created with web technologies but rendered into the terminal and accessed over SSH.I like that this brings back some kind of old days of the internet feeling and uses web technologies but sidesteps the public World Wide Web, even though it’s still on the internet.You can try it out too right now, and I’m thinking about making the self-hosting specialized applications part a first-class thing. But right now, the project is organized as a browser rendering engine, which I spent eight years on since the end of 2018, most of that without AI, writing all the code myself. And then a terminal renderer, which connects to that browser renderer and takes its output and bookkeeping and renders it into the terminal.And that is designed by me, including the layout algorithm, but AI wrote almost all the code. So I am basically a software designer and AI nudger in that one. My flow is essentially like one agent at a time, and I’ll monitor it, nudge it based on my intuitions if it gets stuck or needs help or whatever, and guide it towards the goal. Plus being the designer and decision maker.AI makes a lot of decisions, but I make the most of them. So that’s just describing my flow of how I created this terminal thing, which is roughly around a year old.And originally it was created with Gemini Pro 3.1, which at that time a year ago was sort of the most capable model for complex tasks. And I literally did it on the free AI Studio web application, just like pasting in code listings. Obviously, with agents now, everything is much smoother as a workflow.This demo has some kind of a cap on it, so let me know if it hits that. It probably won’t, but feel free to tell me. And you can self-host it today. Let me know if you want to do that.This text was dictated by me and then had punctuation and paragraphing added, but the wording was not changed.
Enrichment
- Theme
- browser automation and scraping for AI
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- html css and javascript in the terminal
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Serving terminal apps over SSH is easy with modern Go/Rust SSH libraries, but accurately rendering arbitrary HTML/CSS/DOM into terminal ANSI escape codes in real time requires non-trivial layout-to-text translation.
What it would actually take: The server uses a headless browser (like Chromium via CDP) or a custom DOM tree to compute layout coordinates, then downsamples the visual layout into ANSI escape sequences, 24-bit color text cells, and braille Unicode patterns. An SSH server (like Go's `gliderlabs/ssh` or Charm's `wish`) streams virtual terminal escape codes to incoming SSH clients with full PTY resize handling.
Discussion
10 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: dub-cli (CLI tool for agentic/automation use cases), tmux (for TUI automation harness)
Concerns raised: Script execution security risk - attempts to open scripts in terminal automatically, SSH protocol link behavior unclear/potentially misleading to users, Enables automation of systems not intended to be automated, Repeated posting/spam across multiple threads
Feature requests: Self-hosting option documentation/availability
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 290 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #168 of 291 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 256 days after the earliest competitor.
- Toad. A unified terminal UI for coding agents · hn · 2025-12-18 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- I made a browser TUI with its own layout engine · hn · 2026-07-07 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- I vibe coded a DAW for the terminal. how'd I do? · hn · 2026-02-27 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Cockpit for you Claude Code agents in Rust · hn · 2026-08-01 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- A Claude Code skill that renders decisions as interactive HTML pages · hn · 2026-03-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Visual Workspace for Agents Based on Unix · hn · 2026-06-25 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- SubjectiveZero, an open-source agentic node editor for creative coding · hn · 2026-07-10 · 25 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- XHTML · hn · 2026-09-24 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.