Ratty: Tiltable 3D terminal, 877 stars day 1

The Breakthrough

Orhun shipped Ratty v0.2.0, a Rust terminal emulator that tilts the entire shell surface into a 3D scene with depth and lighting via Ctrl+Alt+Enter.

What Actually Worked

• Users press Ctrl+Alt+Enter to toggle 3D mode, which warps the terminal backward like a curved monitor; Mobius mode adds a twisting warp animation.
• Cursor loads any OBJ or GLB file, such as the default spinning rat or bundled Ferris crab mascot; supports color configuration.
• Ratty Graphics Protocol (RGP) escape sequences let apps register assets, position objects (e.g., at row 12 column 40), and animate them; Ratatui-rgp widget wraps RGP for TUIs.
• Kitty graphics protocol handles inline images from compatible tools.
• Rendering pipeline runs a pseudo-terminal for VT100 parsing, draws buffer in Ratatui on CPU, renders text on GPU via parley, reads pixels back to CPU, and presents via Bevy texture in flat or 3D scene.

Context

Terminals remained flat rectangles for 40 years, a constraint Orhun questioned like Terry Davis did in TempleOS by embedding 3D meshes next to text. Ratty ignores speed competitions (Alacritty, Wezterm, Ghostty lead there) to explore spatial interfaces. Builders extend it via RGP for demos like TempleOS-style editors with inline models, split 2D/3D paint apps, and Tetris clones. Install uses cargo install ratty or pacman on Arch; heavy cold builds stem from 600+ Rust deps including Bevy game engine, but prebuilts exist for macOS (Apple Silicon/Intel) and Linux. v0.2.0 added window transparency, enhanced keyboard reporting (for Helix/Neovim), Mac CI builds, and renamed toggle to 3D mode. Drawbacks include CPU-GPU roundtrip latency on low-spec machines and RGP client lock-in, but it invites experimentation beyond flat terminals.

Notable Quotes

• "Terminals have been flat for 40 years and maybe that's a constraint nobody questioned."
• "It's the same instinct Terry Davis had when he built Temple OS where you could embed a 3D mesh next to a paragraph of text and the OS just dealt with it."
• "No one's about to switch their daily driver to this... but that's the entire pitch... why nobody questioned the rectangle for 40 years."

Content References

• TempleOS inspires 3D embedding next to text.

Substance over meta

Video tours repo, demos features, explains v0.2 updates, and benchmarks popularity (877 GitHub stars, 577 HN points day one) over performance.