I'm working on a web app that mimics the look and feel of an old MS-DOS program—think Turbo Pascal IDE or Norton Commander.<p>The goal* is a keyboard-only, text-based UI running inside a browser, with windowed UI elements and ASCII graphics.<p>I've looked into Xterm.js, React TUI libraries, and vanilla JS canvas solutions, but I'd love input from those who've built something similar.<p>Are there any existing projects or libraries I should check out?<p>Would appreciate any insights, cheers!<p>(*And the ultimate end goal is to have an LLM create interfaces on the fly from user prompts)
It's pretty simple to get a font that looks like DOS, render an <input> tag with custom styling for the command line entry, and an output window for the scrolling portion that copied the last input into the output and then cleared the input.<p>You can use CSS to make the scrolling window grow from the bottom to the top of the screen, like a DOS window would scroll up and then off.<p>If this were my project, I'd start with plain browser web components[0] rather than a framework. You could definitely have Cursor write the UI portion for you and then, once you like it, add the command handling.<p>I wrote an article[1] with some strategies and examples of this kind of complex prompt-driven development with Cursor.<p>[0] <a href="https://levelup.gitconnected.com/getting-started-with-web-components-lit-part-1-911aa7058e9b" rel="nofollow">https://levelup.gitconnected.com/getting-started-with-web-co...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://levelup.gitconnected.com/license-to-kill-coding-with-cursor-ai-agents-1df3d6a0bfe8" rel="nofollow">https://levelup.gitconnected.com/license-to-kill-coding-with...</a>
I've seen a DOS interface for the browser talked about on HN before. I know I've seen at least one that was really impressive but I can't find the link... it was in a comment. And it wasn't one of the ones you mentioned I don't think.<p>Ahhh, here ya go: <a href="https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss</a><p>via: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804309">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28804309</a><p>There may be more too: <a href="https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/" rel="nofollow">https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/</a><p>Edit: I also found this: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418424">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418424</a>
The most popular GUI tool for terminals is called ncurses. There is a JavaScript implementation in a tool called Blessed.<p>You can also find a lot of similar projects by searching for ncurses along with HTML or JavaScript or CSS.