Ratty brings GPU-rendered 3D graphics to Rust terminals

Is Ratty a real next-step terminal for Rust tinkerers, or just a flashy demo? The pitch is unusually concrete: Orhun Parmaksız has built a GPU-rendered terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics, a spinning rat cursor, and both 2D and 3D modes, so the terminal stops being a flat text grid and starts acting like a rendering surface.

Ratty is built in Rust with Ratatui and takes inspiration from TempleOS, which already tells you where Parmaksız’s instincts live. The project also keeps one foot in familiar territory, supporting image rendering through the Kitty Graphics Protocol, but its main trick is a custom Ratty Graphics Protocol. That protocol registers .obj and .glb assets by path, then places them in terminal cell space with controls for animation, scale, color, depth, and brightness. The effect is not just ornamental. It opens up a very specific lane for Rust developers who want inline previews, visual debug surfaces, and terminal UIs that can handle real 3D assets instead of pretending every interaction has to be text-only.

That makes Ratty easy to contrast with the terminals most Rust people already know. Alacritty stays the minimalist speed machine, built for getting out of the way. WezTerm gives you a much broader daily-driver shell with richer workflow features. Kitty already proved there is room for GPU-backed terminal features, especially around graphics and image handling. Ratty goes a step further and asks a different question: what if the terminal could place objects in space, not just draw glyphs quickly? For people building experimental TUIs, game-like tooling, or visualization-heavy CLI apps, that is the interesting part.

The launch has not been quiet. Ratty’s project site went live four days ago, the GitHub repository has drawn about 1.1k stars, and recent commits have included a v0.2.0 release, performance improvements, and website and download-link updates. The surrounding launch package also included a blog post and a demo video, which helped frame the project as more than a throwaway proof of concept. A Rust crate page also points to ratatui-rgp, a Ratatui widget for inline 3D objects, which suggests the idea is already spreading into the broader terminal-app ecosystem.

Parmaksız’s own track record explains why this landed so hard. His GitHub profile already lists Ratty alongside a stack of Rust terminal projects, and his personal site calls him an open-source enthusiast who “reinvents the wheel and builds terminal stuff.” The Hacker News response made the point even louder: 640 points and 211 comments in roughly 23 hours. Ratty may not replace WezTerm, Alacritty, or kitty tomorrow, but it has already shown that a Rust terminal can be more than a place to print logs.