Chromium running inside your terminal

carbonyl

Carbonyl is a Chromium based browser built to run in a terminal. Read the blog post.

It supports pretty much all Web APIs including WebGL, WebGPU, audio and video playback, animations, etc..

It's snappy, starts in less than a second, runs at 60 FPS, and idles at 0% CPU usage. It does not require a window server (i.e. works in a safe-mode console), and even runs through SSH.

Carbonyl originally started as html2svg and is now the runtime behind it.

Usage

# Watch YouTube inside a Docker container
$ docker run -ti fathyb/carbonyl https://youtube.com

Demo

Know issues

• Fullscreen mode not supported yet

Development

Few notes:

• You need to build Chromium
• Building Carbonyl is almost the same as building Chromium with extra steps to patch and bundle the Rust library. Scripts in the scripts/ directory are simple wrappers around gn, ninja, etc..
• Building Chromium for arm64 on Linux requires an amd64 processor
• Carbonyl is only tested on Linux and macOS, other platforms likely require code changes to Chromium
• Chromium is huge and takes a long time to build, making your computer mostly unresponsive. An 8-core CPU such as an M1 Max or an i9 9900k with 10 Gbps fiber takes around ~1 hour to fetch and build. It requires around 100 GB of disk space.

Fetch

Fetch Chromium's code.

$ ./scripts/gclient.sh sync

Apply patches

Any changes made to Chromium will be reverted, make sure to save any changes you made.

$ ./scripts/patches.sh apply

Configure

$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/Default

Default is the target name, you can use multiple ones and pick any name you'd like, i.e.:

$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/release
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/debug
# or if you'd like to build a multi-platform image
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/arm64
$ ./scripts/gn.sh args out/amd64

When prompted, enter the following arguments:

import("//carbonyl/src/browser/args.gn")

# uncomment this to build for arm64
# target_cpu="arm64"

# uncomment this to enable ccache
# cc_wrapper="env CCACHE_SLOPPINESS=time_macros ccache"

# uncomment this if you're building for macOS
# use_lld=false

# uncomment this for a release build
# is_debug=false
# symbol_level=0

Build binaries

$ ./scripts/build.sh Default

This should produce the following outputs:

• out/Default/headless_shell: browser binary
• out/Default/icudtl.dat
• out/Default/libEGL.so
• out/Default/libGLESv2.so
• out/Default/v8_context_snapshot.bin

Build Docker image

# Build arm64 Docker image using binaries from the Default target
$ ./scripts/docker.sh arm64 Default
# Build amd64 Docker image using binaries from the Default target
$ ./scripts/docker.sh amd64 Default

Run

$ ./scripts/run.sh Default https://wikipedia.org