I built a 3D terminal emulator in Rust!
I built a 3D terminal emulator in Rust!
For a larger project requiring the ability to work with my computer in 3D, I developed a 3D terminal emulator. It uses the wonderful alacritty_terminal crate from the Alacritty terminal for VTE parsing and PTY initialization, and it uses wgpu and rend3 for the rendering code. The actual text rendering is done using multichannel SDF rendering, generated lazily at runtime to a texture atlas using the msdfgen crate.
A project like this would've been impossible if not for Rust's friendly library ecosystem and the Alacritty project's efforts to make their core terminal emulator code reusable for other means.
Looks nice, but I'm more interested in what project would make this useful. I can only think of VR stuff, but then you'd probably use a VR framework for it.
Imagine being stuck in VR Vim.
It is a VR project! I needed fast, highly-legible text from a variety of viewing angles and MSDFs fit the bill.
I'm curious, when you say a VR framework, do you mean something like Stereokit?
I don't actually know anything about VR development, I just assumed that you'd be working with something like a game engine to handle the play area, controls, stereo 3D rendering and generally as a platform for using multiple applications in one headset.
Stereokit looks like it's exactly that. I'm wondering, how do you solve those things if you're not using a framework?
After seeing the screenshot and not looking at the community first, I thought you had made a terminal emulator in the game, and not the language.
Where's the code? I'm sure everyone interested in VR development could benefit
Thank you for the encouragement! Unfortunately, I'm not able to share the source code just yet, but I do intend to license it under the Apache license as soon as I can. Please refer to this comment for more info: https://programming.dev/comment/2568603
Are you making a vr desktop/wm?
Almost! I'm developing an experimental actor-based VR runtime geared towards supporting hot-reload as a first-class development workflow. The idea is that by letting all functionality, executed as WebAssembly, be added, reloaded, or removed at runtime, it should eventually become possible to develop the space entirely within the space, i.e. without ever needing to remove your VR headset.
A preliminary requirement to that is some "bootstrapping" environment that doesn't need the space to have pre-existing VR tooling for writing new behavior and compiling to WebAssembly. I decided that a terminal emulator had the highest flexibility to time investment ratio based on my experiences building another prototype terminal emulator using alacritty_terminal.
Chances are that the native terminal emulator will come in handy over the entire lifetime of my project's development, given that I and the other contributors are regular modal editor users and from what I know there are currently no self-hosting WebAssembly compilers that could be invoked without some kind of access to the native OS.
Isn't that the Skybox from Learnopengl.com ? Recognized it almost immediately
This is useful enough for me to want to use it now. Any way that we can? I likebto write stuff in vim and this seems immersive.