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raphamorim/rio

★ 6,918 · Rust · MIT · updated Jun 2026

A hardware-accelerated GPU terminal emulator focusing to run in desktops and browsers.

Rio is a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust, using wgpu for rendering. It targets desktop (macOS, Linux, Windows) and browser (WASM) from a single codebase. Aimed at developers who want fast rendering and modern protocol support without giving up configurability.

1. The wgpu backend means rendering runs on Metal, Vulkan, DX12, or WebGPU — no platform-specific graphics code per OS. 2. Protocol support is genuinely broad: Kitty graphics protocol, iTerm2 image protocol, Sixel, and Kitty keyboard protocol are all implemented, not just listed. 3. The repo is architecturally honest — rio-backend, rio-window, corcovado, and the frontends are separate crates with clear ownership rather than one monolithic src/. 4. Active: last push was 3 days ago, packaging is in repology across many distros including a Flatpak for Steam Deck.

1. rio-window is a fork of winit with local patches — that means every upstream winit improvement has to be manually cherry-picked, and the divergence will compound over time. 2. The WASM frontend (frontends/wasm/) is minimal; running a real terminal in the browser with full PTY semantics is still an unsolved problem and this doesn't appear to solve it. 3. corcovado is a vendored fork of mio 0.6, a very old async I/O library. This is dead weight — modern Rust async I/O has moved well past mio 0.6 and this fork is not getting upstream fixes. 4. Windows support exists but is clearly a secondary target — the macOS-specific platform code is more developed and issues tend to skew toward macOS/Linux.

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