Support rendering web content in TUI apps - aka WebView support

[iSeiryu]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
View websites or render HTML strings inside a terminal. There are lots of potential uses for this feature. I'm not sure if it's even possible with the current state of dotnet without writing a whole new HTML rendering engine.

Describe the solution you'd like
Either incorporate one of the existing WebView controls, e.g. https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNetCore.Components.WebView/ or create a new one based on some existing engine.

Additional context
Existing CLI based web browers:
https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl
http://lynx.browser.org/
https://github.com/tats/w3m/tree/master/doc

[tznind]

This is certainly an ambitious feature.

Implementing from scratch is not really feasible, so there would need to be a library which did all the heavy lifting (web page -> ascii, scroll, request link etc). So probably a library wrapping chromium or something. Any library/binary that is directly writing to screen e.g. with curses is going to be harder to wrap.

This would make more sense as a seperate library:

• Avoids adding any big dependencies to Terminal.Gui
• Isolates issues relating to web behaviours
• Provides dedicated channel for the work

The other way to deal with this would be to have your main app exit from the Terminal.Gui main loop and run a web browser (e.g. lynx) full screen in the terminal. Then on exit re-launch the terminal gui. But that would not allow you to embed

[BDisp]

If you want to have an idea on how to do this here is a Blazor API done for the Terminal.Gui v1. For Terminal.Gui v2 this will not be possible anymore because the ConsoleDriver and others API's isn't exposed anymore. So as @tznind said avoids any big dependencies to Terminal.Gui. Another solution is add a new project integrated with on the gui.cs and ask to tig if it's possible to do it. Good luck.

[tig]

If you want to have an idea on how to do this here is a Blazor API done for the Terminal.Gui v1. For Terminal.Gui v2 this will not be possible anymore because the ConsoleDriver and others API's isn't exposed anymore. So as @tznind said avoids any big dependencies to Terminal.Gui. Another solution is add a new project integrated with on the gui.cs and ask to tig if it's possible to do it. Good luck.

@BDisp the OP is not asking for Terminal.Gui apps in a browser. He/she is asking for a web browser within a Terminal.Gui app.

[BDisp]

@BDisp the OP is not asking for Terminal.Gui apps in a browser. He/she is asking for a web browser within a Terminal.Gui app.

Ops my bad, sorry for the misunderstand.

[tig]

This is certainly an ambitious feature.

Implementing from scratch is not really feasible, so there would need to be a library which did all the heavy lifting (web page -> ascii, scroll, request link etc). So probably a library wrapping chromium or something. Any library/binary that is directly writing to screen e.g. with curses is going to be harder to wrap.

This would make more sense as a seperate library:

• Avoids adding any big dependencies to Terminal.Gui
• Isolates issues relating to web behaviours
• Provides dedicated channel for the work

The other way to deal with this would be to have your main app exit from the Terminal.Gui main loop and run a web browser (e.g. lynx) full screen in the terminal. Then on exit re-launch the terminal gui. But that would not allow you to embed

I have experience with .NET Html engines as part of https://github.com/tig/winprint.

I use LiteHtml to be able to print HTML files. See https://github.com/tig/winprint/tree/master/src/WinPrint.LiteHtml

99% of the cases users of WinPrint choose fixed-pitch fonts, and thus it would not be THAT hard to use LiteHtml to be able to render to a Terminal.Gui View.

[iSeiryu]

@tig just curious were those strings supposed to look like this or someone forgot to update them?
https://github.com/tig/winprint/blob/master/src/WinPrint.LiteHtml/LibInterop.cs#L47

The rendered pages don't have to look fancy, just get a general idea of what a page looks like and to be able to read text.
But rendering a single page is just a part of the problem. Being able to navigate between pages by clicking links is the bare minimum for the internet surfing.

Maybe the engine that https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl uses could be an option? It seems very light-weight.

[tig]

@tig just curious were those strings supposed to look like this or someone forgot to update them? https://github.com/tig/winprint/blob/master/src/WinPrint.LiteHtml/LibInterop.cs#L47

Sorry, don't remember.

The rendered pages don't have to look fancy, just get a general idea of what a page looks like and to be able to read text. But rendering a single page is just a part of the problem. Being able to navigate between pages by clicking links is the bare minimum for the internet surfing.

Maybe the engine that https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl uses could be an option? It seems very light-weight.

Wow. That's cool.

It's not clear to me if this is a PORT of Chromium or somehow uses Chromium??

[a-usr]

According to this carbonyl uses a modified version of the chromium headless shell

[tig]

According to this carbonyl uses a modified version of the chromium headless shell

Thinking about this more, I'm skeptical a Chromium-based solution will work well for many Terminal.Gui scenarios:

• Huge bloat. One great things about Terminal.Gui is it has a small-ish footprint and thus can run on very constrained devices. If terminal.Gui's 'WebView' support were based on Chromium this would no longer be true.
• Complex dependency. Similar to above, but also means setup / deployment would be tricky. Imagine if Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleGuiTools wanted to use WebView in some way. No way, would it be acceptable that Install-Module Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleGuiTools install and configure Chromium.

I'm back to the idea that WebView should be based on pure .NET based HTML engine like LiteHtml.

[tznind]

I wonder how feasible it would be to have a view that wrapped another console process (kind of like tmux). This would allow running w3c or lynx in a view as well as solving another asked for feature which is to run a full console surrounded by terminal gui components.

I know there has been work in the past on TerminalView e.g. https://github.com/migueldeicaza/XtermSharp/blob/master/GuiCsHost/TerminalView.cs which might allow something like this (see #1244 (comment)).