Carbonyl — Run Chromium Inside Your Terminal

Introduction

Carbonyl embeds a full Chromium browser engine and renders web pages as text and block characters directly in the terminal. It supports CSS, JavaScript, WebGL, images, and video playback, making it a unique tool for browsing the modern web without a graphical display server.

What Carbonyl Does

• Renders full web pages including CSS layouts, JavaScript, and animations in the terminal
• Displays images using Unicode block characters and 24-bit color
• Supports WebGL content by rendering frames and converting them to text
• Handles navigation, scrolling, clicking, and keyboard input interactively
• Plays video and audio content within the terminal environment

Architecture Overview

Carbonyl patches Chromium's compositor layer to output frames as terminal escape sequences instead of GPU-rendered pixels. Each frame is converted from a bitmap into a grid of Unicode half-block characters with foreground and background colors. Input events are translated from terminal escape codes back into browser events.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Easiest to run via Docker: docker run --rm -ti fathyb/carbonyl
• Building from source requires Rust and the Chromium build toolchain
• Set the initial URL as a command-line argument
• Supports standard Chromium flags for proxy, user-agent, and other settings
• Works over SSH for remote browsing on headless servers

Key Features

• Full JavaScript and modern CSS support via the Chromium engine
• Image and video rendering using terminal color capabilities
• Sub-second startup time compared to headless Chrome approaches
• Interactive mouse and keyboard navigation
• Works over SSH sessions on remote machines without X11 forwarding

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Lynx / w3m — Text-only browsers without JavaScript or CSS support
• Browsh — Firefox-based terminal browser; Carbonyl uses Chromium and renders natively
• Headless Chrome — No visual output; Carbonyl provides an interactive terminal UI
• tmux + browser — Requires X11 forwarding; Carbonyl works in pure terminal mode

FAQ

Q: Does Carbonyl support JavaScript? A: Yes. It runs a full Chromium engine, so all standard JavaScript works.

Q: How does image rendering work? A: Images are approximated using Unicode half-block characters with 24-bit ANSI colors.

Q: Can I use it on a headless server over SSH? A: Yes. That is one of its primary use cases since it needs no display server.

Q: What are the system requirements? A: The Docker image is the easiest path. Building from source requires significant disk space for the Chromium build.

Sources

• https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl
• https://fathyb.com/carbonyl