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Show HN: Horizon – GPU-accelerated infinite-canvas terminal in Rust (github.com)

84 points by petersunde ↗ HN
Tabs, splits, and tmux work fine until you have several projects open with logs, tests, and long-running shells. I kept rebuilding context instead of resuming work. Horizon puts shells on an infinite canvas. You can arrange them into workspaces and reopen later with layout, scrollback, and history intact.

Built in 3 days with Claude/Codex, dogfooding the workflow as I went. Feedback and contributions welcome.

21 comments

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tekacs
This is fun! I switched to https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux for a while, but had to switch back to Ghostty due to its unreliability, high memory and CPU usage and a bunch of bugs.

This makes a lot of sense, but... it'd be great to allow pulling out of a canvas into a second canvas for those of us with multiple screens (you at least end up needing one window per screen).

In general it feels like... more structure rather than less feels like it'd be the smoothest experience. I'll play with your Ctrl+K shortcut and see if it ends up feeling like I can get everywhere that I need quickly.

But... nice work!

Note for jj users like me: you need to `git lfs pull` if you want to `cargo run --release`!

Update: No luck creating any 'shell' workspaces (it looks like you use GNU-only flags to script) – I'll push a fix once I find it.

Also: the AGENTS.md is wrong JFYI - it points to portable-pty, when this is using alacritty_terminal's tty (on rustix-openpty)

cadamsdotcom
Maybe I’m old but this sounds like MDI (multiple-document interface) of the late 90s.

Went the way of the dodo probably because it’s hard for non power users to grok.

But this is a power user tool - seeems like a fit!

fritzo
I was hoping this would be an infinite length terminal view, like the opening backstory in Star Wars
ms_menardi
This is great! Two things I noticed immediately:

the settings window overlaps with the minimap.

I think it'd be neat if you could zoom? The reason I'd use this over a tiling window manager is to fit more terminals on a screen at once. I think if there was a capability like the Strategic Zoom in Supreme Commander (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hJY7exr9KU) it would be much easier to manage many terminals at once, and take advantage of the infinite canvas.

MrDrMcCoy
SupCom Zoom was the single greatest UX improvement to strategy games, and it's sad that nothing outside of the TA family picked it up. BAR and TA Escalation of course have it, and are among my favorites across the entire genre.
jauntywundrkind
Feels very Niri like, in a positive way. Niri's "scrollable" interface always has room to the right & down!

One of the Niri tools I built for myself is to let me insert a new row up top, to expand up. Thats afaik not super easy in base Niri, constraints the spatial growth some.

I'm pretty close to having some persistence of terminal windows, tmux, etc in Niri, with some tools to dump current state nicely. Doing an actual restore operation would be a good thing to build towards.

hokkos
The last thing I want is the figma experience for my terminal
riquito
I love these kind of projects trying out non mainstream approaches! Thanks for sharing
iknowstuff
Hmm I guess I’d like my terminal to remember my shell sessions like that and just lef me open them in multiple windows so I can use my window manager to arrange as I please.

And then I’d like my window manager to be infinitely scrollable like a canvas with like 3 fingers on my touchpad. Do any exist like that?

firegodjr
Niri is fantastic for that! Pretty barebones though, I recommend grabbing Noctalia Shell to run alongside
tamimio
Amazing, I will give it a try!

I played with egui before, I really enjoyed it, but I remember I stumbled across some issues had to use dioxus instead.

skeledrew
I've been hurting for something like this for a while now. Many tmux windows soon become unwieldy to switch among, same as having a bunch of terminal tabs, and I have an unhealthy mix of both. Hopefully this scratches the itch.
amadeuspagel
This is really an infinite canvas window manager, but only for terminal windows.

I looked for a general infinite canvas window manager and discovered InfiniteGlass[1]. I wasn't able to install it though, even on Ubuntu Mate 18.04, which the installation instructions are supposed to be tested for.

I've switched to KDE recently, using its default terminal, and I feel like I can't miss things like opening the file browser from the terminal or vice versa anymore, so now what I really want is an infinite canvas desktop environment.

[1]: https://redhog.github.io/InfiniteGlass/