Forking Chrome to Render in a Terminal (2023)
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
fathy.frTechstory
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BrowserTerminalRendering
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The project 'Carbonyl' forks Chrome to render in a terminal, sparking excitement and discussion about its potential applications and technical achievements.
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- 01Story posted
Sep 4, 2025 at 8:54 PM EDT
4 months ago
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Sep 4, 2025 at 10:25 PM EDT
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Sep 5, 2025 at 11:30 AM EDT
4 months ago
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ID: 45133935Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 12:44:40 PM
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https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...
Carbonyl is surprisingly performant and usable, especially with --zoom=300 --bitmap
At lower resolutions, it would be nice to render images using a "subpixel" terminal rendering library like chafa (https://hpjansson.org/chafa/), or maybe sixels/kitty image protocol.
I really wanted something that could just work...
Now that being said, the project was really cool.
So it might come slightly off topic but when I had last viewed the project, there were a lot of people asking if the project is dead or more importantly, what has happened to author and there were comments like this after the job part and even hackernews showed concern of the dev's life https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl/issues/201 [is the dev killed by IDF in Gaza #201]
No need to render to ASCII/Unicode anymore!
...but at that point X forwarding or VNC seems more useful.
[1] https://www.brow.sh/
brow.sh (firefox in the terminal) is still being updated though.
This is really, really cool!
Skia is a incredible abstraction layer. The linked article at the top of the OP https://fathy.fr/html2svg (2022) has some great graphics of how Skia can support various backends including PDF rendering (via https://skia.org/docs/user/sample/pdf/).
It's also worth noting that the Chrome Graphics team is writing yet another Skia rasterization backend, just announced last month: https://blog.chromium.org/2025/07/introducing-skia-graphite-...
Given that this article came out a couple years ago, it's quite possible that it was seen by the Chrome team and inspired them to look at making a new backend from scratch!
"Forking xterm to render graphical applications"