tgpu

A stupid experiment in rendering 3D graphics to the terminal using the kitty graphics protocol

I've only tested it with Ghostty.

Trying it out

View the demo with different scenes:

cargo run --release

Run shadertty, shadertoy but it runs in your terminal:

cargo run --release -- --shadertoy shader.glsl --ichannel0=perlin_noise.png

How it works

• Uses wgpu to render graphics on the GPU.
• Blits the output texture to 2 double-buffered mmap'ed files using copy_texture_to_buffer
• Emits kitty graphics protocol escape code to instruct terminal to render one file as an image
• Uses spin_sleep to cap the render loop to 60 FPS

Things to note

• I've only tested this on macOS and ghostty
• This only works for terminals which support the kitty graphics protocol
• There is no way to do vsync (that I know of)
• This was vibecoded in a weekend for fun