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liamg
darktile
Go2018–2025
liamg / darktile

darktile

:waning_crescent_moon: Darktile is an experimental/abandoned GPU rendered terminal emulator designed for tiling window managers.

Command LineGames & EmulationSystems & Infrastructure
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7Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

:waning_crescent_moon: Darktile is an experimental/abandoned GPU rendered terminal emulator designed for tiling window managers.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-11-28 01:43:58 UTC to 2025-10-01 06:29:01 UTC.

01232018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
JdeBP·Oct 1, 2025
Those two are already balanced by Zutty and Rio. So let's have a look around at some of the emulators that make using the GPU a marketing point. DarkTile (https://github.com/liamg/darktile) accepts TTF and OTF, so presumably if you can get your bitmap font of choice converted into those formats you are alright. GhosTTY (https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty) gained proper bitmap font support just last month, the issues list says, but is reliant upon what FreeType and CoreText can handle. It has an open issue discussing those vis-a-vis bitmap fonts. Trap2 (https://github.com/tale/trap2) likewise relies upon FreeType. Contour (https://github.com/contour-terminal/contour) at least appears to have bitmap font support. Alacritty, WezTerm, and Kitty get a lot of mentions in the issues list.
In Rio Terminal: A hardware-accelerated GPU terminal emulator
LarryClapp·Dec 21, 2023Submission

Show HN: Hucksh – A shell with a very good memory

In the deep mists of time (circa 2012), I was playing with the Go standard library, and saw how easy it was to stand up a webserver that let you navigate a remote file system, and I thought it was pretty neat. I took a look at my shell history and a frequent pattern of commands was "cd, ls, cd, ls, ...". And I thought "I love my keyboard, but you know, point and click might be nice in this context." And then I thought, "It'd be even cooler if you could run commands there." Skip forward several years, a few earlier implementations, a name change, and now there's Hucksh(ell), a bash-like shell that makes it easy to do all that. There's a directory navigation tab, where you can click around to navigate, use forward and back buttons (like a browser), and also a "navigate" mode where you can select the directory to change to with a single keys
Read the rest
troke. The system remembers every directory you do anything in and lets you choose them from a list, which you can order by name, time last used, or frequency of use. And finally, of course, there are shell tabs where you can run individual commands. Each command gets its own widget in the UI, separate from the others, in its own tty, with no overlap. The system saves each command you run, along with its start & stop times, the directory you were in, the result code when it finishes, and (this is the fun part) the command output, all in a sqlite database, on disk. (Disk is cheap, yeah? Might as well do something with it.) This allows you to do some neat things with history and context. * Keep the same tab open forever, maintaining months or years of context and history * Pick up where you left off a month or a year ago * Pick up where you left off after a system restart (like when you restart your browser and it reopens all your windows and tabs) * Review everything you've done in a project directory * Review everything you did yesterday, or a month ago I hope in the future to make it easy to share history, which could help with new employee onboarding, teaching, asking or answering questions on StackOverflow, documenting a penetration test, or anywhere else you want to easily share your work or consume someone else's work. Everything is in Go. * The front-end uses Gio UI, a cross-platform GUI for Go * The shell itself is https://github.com/mvdan/sh, a bash-like command interpreter * The terminal emulator is a fork of Darktile (https://github.com/liamg/darktile) with very few changes. This is not a SaaS. You download code and run the front- and back-end yourself, like ssh/sshd. (Except it doesn't run as root.) This is a commercial product. Without a license, the app limits you to a single top-level window, with two shell tabs. (Similar to a single iTerm window with two tabs.) With a license, as many windows and tabs as you like. I'm looking for any kind of feedback whatsoever, positive or negative, from the app itself, to the documentation and other online information, to this very post. hucksh is currently available for macOS and Linux. Learn more: https://huckridge.notion.site/Hucksh-overview-2fdcaf7d639145... Download, etc: https://huckridge.notion.site/Hucksh-online-download-purchas...
93 points · Open discussion
PavlovsCat·Nov 28, 2018
There's probably lots of room for optimization, for example currently it sets and resets all sorts of GPU state on each print call, for each character, which is rather expensive: https://github.com/liamg/aminal/blob/master/glfont/font.go#L... Speaking of the main loop, for every columm and every row: cx := uint(gui.terminal.GetLogicalCursorX()) which in turn calls another function -- move that outside of the loop and do it once. Generally buffer values that don't change and get used in loops, instead of fetching them by calling functions on each iteration. Also, while it may not matter much in this case unless there are other sources of GC churn, just because I noticed it: don't create an array for the vertices for every character to then throw it away and recreate it, have one and keep reusing that.
In Aminal: Golang terminal emulator from scratch

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