ratty

Ratty: A GPU-rendered terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics 🧀
^{Inspired by TempleOS | Built with Rust & Ratatui}

ratty-demo-with-audio.mp4

"Rodent-obsessed developer creates Ratty to bring 3D graphics to the command line" - The Register
"This New Terminal is Absurd (But Totally Fun)" - It's FOSS
"10 weird OSS projects you need right now... " - Fireship
"Your terminal can render in 3D now, and Rust made it surprisingly usable" - MakeUseOf

Features

Spinning rat cursor (customizable)
Traditional 2D and new 3D mode!
Inline 3D objects
GPU-backed text rendering
Image support (via Kitty Graphics Protocol >:()

▶️ Watch the demo video here!
📚 Read the behind the scenes blog post here!

3D mode

Ever wondered what's behind the terminal? Press Ctrl+Alt+Enter!

ratty-3d-with-audio.mp4

Installation

Requirements:

A GPU / graphics stack supported by Bevy and wgpu
Melted cheese (optional but recommended)

crates.io

cargo install ratty

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S ratty

Nix

See the Nix packaging docs for flake, NixOS, and Home Manager usage.

nix run github:orhun/ratty

Binary releases

Prebuilt binaries are available on the GitHub releases page for direct download.

From Git

Requirements:

Rust toolchain with Cargo
on Bazzite / Bluefin: sudo rpm-ostree install gcc fontconfig-devel wayland-devel (then reboot)
on Debian / Ubuntu: sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install gcc pkgconf libfontconfig-dev libwayland-dev
on Fedora: sudo dnf install gcc fontconfig-devel wayland-devel

cargo install --git https://github.com/orhun/ratty

Configuration

The default configuration file is available in config/ratty.toml.

You can copy this file to $HOME/.config/ratty/ratty.toml and customize it.

Changing the cursor

[cursor.model]
path = "CairoSpinyMouse.obj"
scale_factor = 6.0
brightness = 0.5
x_offset = 0.5
plane_offset = 18.0
visible = true

[cursor.animation]
spin_speed = 1.4
bob_speed = 2.2
bob_amplitude = 0.08

For cursor.model.path, Ratty supports both .obj, .glb, and .stl assets.

Other useful cursor fields are:

scale_factor: scales the model relative to the terminal cell size
brightness: adjusts the cursor material brightness
x_offset: shifts the cursor model horizontally inside the cell
plane_offset: pushes the cursor away from the warped terminal surface in 3D mode
visible: show the custom 3D cursor model instead of only the terminal cursor

Key Bindings

Key	Action
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`C`	Copy selection
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`V`	Paste clipboard
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`Enter`	Toggle 2D / ortho 3D
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`P`	Toggle perspective
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`M`	Toggle Mobius mode
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`Shift`+`0-9`	Activate camera slot
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`Up`	Increase warp
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`Down`	Decrease warp
`Alt`+`PageUp`	Scroll one page up
`Alt`+`PageDown`	Scroll one page down
`Alt`+`Up`	Scroll one line up
`Alt`+`Down`	Scroll one line down
`Ctrl`+`=`	Increase font size
`Ctrl`+`-`	Decrease font size
`Ctrl`+`Alt`+`0`	Reset font size

In custom configs, ToggleOrtho3DMode is the current action name for the orthographic 3D toggle. The old Toggle3DMode action remains supported as a backward-compatible alias.

Camera slot actions are named ActivateCameraSlot0 through ActivateCameraSlot9. The extra Shift modifier keeps slot 0 distinct from the existing Ctrl+Alt+0 font reset.

Inline 3D objects

Ratty uses its own protocol, the Ratty Graphics Protocol, to place inline 3D objects in terminal space.

RGP supports:

registering .obj, .glb, and .stl assets by path
placing them at terminal cell anchors
animation, scale, color, depth and other attributes
camera control for flat, orthographic, perspective and Mobius views

There is a Ratatui widget called ratatui-rgp available in widget/ if you want to build your own terminal applications that involve inline 3D objects.

Apps

Here are some applications explicitly built around Ratty's Graphics Protocol:

Architecture

Rendering pipeline

The terminal surface currently uses ratatui for the UI buffer, parley_ratatui for text shaping/rendering and Bevy for scene presentation.

Current workflow:

PTY output is parsed by vt100 and drawn into a Ratatui buffer on CPU
parley_ratatui shapes the buffer with Parley and records it as a Vello scene
The scene is handed to Bevy's render world through a double-buffered exchange (scenes are recycled between frames, never cloned or re-recorded)
Vello renders the scene on Bevy's render-world device into a plain Rgba8Unorm storage texture, with no CPU readback in between
That storage texture is copied into an Rgba8UnormSrgb present texture (sampled through an sRGB view, so Vello's sRGB-encoded output is decoded on sample instead of re-encoded), which Bevy presents in the 2D and 3D scenes

The terminal image is fully GPU-resident: the only data crossing from the main world to the render world each frame is the recorded scene, not pixels.

Endorsements

"This is like a legitimately cool project but also I just spent like 20 minutes adjusting the config for the rat spinning to see him spin faster and more erratically and it cracked me up" - @vimlena.com

bluesky-video-1777558230431.mp4

"These kinds of experiments are where creativity is born." - @Coko7
"No comments. Just support." - @Raphamorim (creator of Rio terminal)
"tetro-tui running in Ratty" - @Strophox

Screencast.from.2026-05-04.12-11-50.webm

License

All code is licensed under The MIT License.

^{🦀 ノ( º \_ º ノ) - respect crables!}

Credits

Ratty logo designed by @Strophox & @Harunocaksiz

Copyright

^{The author does not have a rat under the hat!}

Features

3D mode

Installation

crates.io

Arch Linux

Nix

Binary releases

From Git

Configuration

Changing the cursor

Key Bindings

Inline 3D objects

Examples

Big rat

Document

Draw

Rubik's cube

Mobius Chess

Apps

Ratscad

Ratty-runner

ComChan

Architecture

Rendering pipeline

Endorsements

License

Credits

Copyright

KiRaRay

glsl330-cornellbox

xsuite

Voksel

ratty

Features

3D mode

Installation

Binary releases

From Git

Configuration

Changing the cursor

Key Bindings

Inline 3D objects

Examples

Apps

Architecture

Rendering pipeline

Endorsements

License

Credits

Copyright

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