Terminal & TUI Stack

loom-games Doom in any Terminal

loom-doom renders live Chocolate Doom frames as ANSI colors and Unicode glyphs, with half-block, quad, or sextant modes.

Engineering story View source

Project snapshot · measured 2026-10-26

Key facts

Commits 373Last commit 2026-10-10 Source receipt ↗ Commits · 7 days 0 Source receipt ↗ Tickets closed 44 / 69 Source receipt ↗ Studies 8 Source receipt ↗

12-week commit activity

2026-10-26

Aug 3

Aug 10

Aug 17

Aug 24

Aug 31

Sep 7

Sep 14

Sep 21

230

Sep 28

Oct 5

Oct 12

Oct 19

View 12-week data table

Week starting	Commits
2026-08-03	0
2026-08-10	0
2026-08-17	0
2026-08-24	0
2026-08-31	0
2026-09-07	0
2026-09-14	0
2026-09-21	0
2026-09-28	230
2026-10-05	56
2026-10-12	0
2026-10-19	0

Key Features

Runs Chocolate Doom and paints its live frames with colored half, quarter or six-part terminal blocks.
A transparent window captures mouse and keyboard on GNOME Wayland while Doom stays in the terminal.
An on-screen display reports frame rate, frame timing and rendering activity.
Snake difficulty and display options come from YAML specifications.

Verified Engineering Milestones

Chocolate Doom rendered in the terminal (#018, #019, a4e837e, 4ac7f64)
Desktop input capture verified on GNOME Wayland (#035, #036, dcb3f38)
Multi-level render telemetry HUD (#048, 07fb41c)

Stack

Go 1.26.0, C, Loom, Cati, Cobra, SDL2/SDL3, POSIX shared memory, YAML specs, JSON Schema

Why loom-games

A Snake prototype became a test bed for a harder question: how far can terminal rendering go? Doom brings a real game’s pixels and responsive controls into the terminal, exposing the boundaries between game rendering, terminal geometry, and desktop input.

What it does

Three glyph modes

Go maps captured pixels into half-block, quad, or sextant Unicode cells, fitting Doom’s 320×200 frame to terminal geometry.

Desktop input capture

A transparent SDL capture surface forwards mouse and key events while the game remains visible in the terminal. Terminal and hybrid input paths are also documented.

Measured rendering

Telemetry, repaint benchmarks, and real-frame probes make rendering performance and frame recognition inspectable.

Chocolate Doom
C / SDL shim
POSIX shared memory
Go + Cati
ANSI colors + Unicode glyphs

The SDL rendering path is captured and turned into terminal cells.

Recent milestones

2026-10-01 — SDL3 transparency verified live on GNOME Wayland, with an SDL2 fallback. dcb3f38
2026-10-02 — Multi-level Doom rendering telemetry HUD delivered. 07fb41c
2026-10-03 — Adopted Loom v0.3.0 and Cati v0.2.9 alongside repaint benchmark work. 34f2da3

Historical milestones from the review through October 4, 2026.

Testing the desktop boundary

The capture surface was opaque on Wayland; later attempts left a magenta glow. Direct compositor canaries exposed the need for a borderless, windowed-fullscreen SDL3 surface and premultiplied pixels. Frame matching also moved beyond synthetic fixtures: the recorded real-frame probe recognized the status bar in 119/120 samples and health and ammo in 114/115, with a screen transition accounting for the miss.

The October 4 review records 313 commits in six weeks, 63 numbered tickets, and 170 test functions: evidence of pace and breadth across Go, C, SDL, and terminal protocols.

Read the full October 4 story and its facts table.

Current scope and limits

Doom has been tested and is playable in the seven terminals listed below. That evidence does not establish support in every terminal. Issues 061 and 062 still track live checks for grab bindings and renderer cycling. Chocolate Doom is GPL-licensed, and running Doom requires separately supplied, legally obtained WAD game data.

Tested terminals

Owner-reported testing found Doom playable in each of these terminals.

Terminal	Status
Tilix	Tested and playable
Foot	Tested and playable
Kitty	Tested and playable
Ptyxis	Tested and playable
CRT	Tested and playable
xfce4-terminal	Tested and playable
Alacritty	Tested and playable

Renderer performance work in Cati and Loom Games included patches from Google Jules, a cloud coding agent; the changes were reviewed and integrated. See the Loom Games study and the Cati study.

Explore the source

See the source repository for build requirements and project documentation, or browse releases.

Project details

Stack

Go 1.26.0, C, Loom, Cati, Cobra, SDL2/SDL3, POSIX shared memory, YAML specs, JSON Schema

Milestones

Chocolate Doom rendered in the terminal (#018, #019, a4e837e, 4ac7f64) · Desktop input capture verified on GNOME Wayland (#035, #036, dcb3f38) · Multi-level render telemetry HUD (#048, 07fb41c)

Source

https://codeberg.org/ubunatic/loom-games ↗

Architecture

Layer composition

Terminal: Unicode blocks, ANSI true color, TUI
Desktop: Linux, Wayland/X11, SDL2/SDL3
Inference / AI: —
Containers / VM: —
Web: —

Engineering story

loom-games: the story behind the project

Loom Games started with a small ambition: make a Snake game that feels at home in a modern terminal. Its early work separated game rules from screen drawing, described the interface in ANSI mockups, and put tunable values in an embedded YAM…

Read the engineering story

Measurement source · 2026-10-26

Verification receipts

Commits: 373 · Last commit 2026-10-10
git -C <repo> rev-list --count HEAD; git -C <repo> rev-list --count --since=<ISO-week-Monday> --until=<ISO-week-Sunday> HEAD; git -C <repo> rev-list --count --since=<measured-date-6-days>T00:00:00 --until=<measured-date>T23:59:59 HEAD; git -C <repo> log -1 --format=%cs HEAD; ls <repo>/issues | grep '^[0-9].*\.md$'; grep -l -E '^\*\*Status\*\*: *(Closed|Done|Resolved|Fixed|Complete)' <repo>/issues/*.md | wc -l; ls <repo>/docs/studies/*.md
repositories behind spec project ids in ~/projects; private-repo filter is a safety net and matches no spec project today; missing repos reported separately; seven calendar days ending on measured date in the measuring host's local timezone; commit counts include all authors and merge commits reachable from HEAD · measured 2026-10-26
Commits · 7 days: 0
git -C <repo> rev-list --count HEAD; git -C <repo> rev-list --count --since=<ISO-week-Monday> --until=<ISO-week-Sunday> HEAD; git -C <repo> rev-list --count --since=<measured-date-6-days>T00:00:00 --until=<measured-date>T23:59:59 HEAD; git -C <repo> log -1 --format=%cs HEAD; ls <repo>/issues | grep '^[0-9].*\.md$'; grep -l -E '^\*\*Status\*\*: *(Closed|Done|Resolved|Fixed|Complete)' <repo>/issues/*.md | wc -l; ls <repo>/docs/studies/*.md
repositories behind spec project ids in ~/projects; private-repo filter is a safety net and matches no spec project today; missing repos reported separately; seven calendar days ending on measured date in the measuring host's local timezone; commit counts include all authors and merge commits reachable from HEAD · measured 2026-10-26
Tickets closed: 44 / 69
git -C <repo> rev-list --count HEAD; git -C <repo> rev-list --count --since=<ISO-week-Monday> --until=<ISO-week-Sunday> HEAD; git -C <repo> rev-list --count --since=<measured-date-6-days>T00:00:00 --until=<measured-date>T23:59:59 HEAD; git -C <repo> log -1 --format=%cs HEAD; ls <repo>/issues | grep '^[0-9].*\.md$'; grep -l -E '^\*\*Status\*\*: *(Closed|Done|Resolved|Fixed|Complete)' <repo>/issues/*.md | wc -l; ls <repo>/docs/studies/*.md
repositories behind spec project ids in ~/projects; private-repo filter is a safety net and matches no spec project today; missing repos reported separately; seven calendar days ending on measured date in the measuring host's local timezone; commit counts include all authors and merge commits reachable from HEAD · measured 2026-10-26
Studies: 8
git -C <repo> rev-list --count HEAD; git -C <repo> rev-list --count --since=<ISO-week-Monday> --until=<ISO-week-Sunday> HEAD; git -C <repo> rev-list --count --since=<measured-date-6-days>T00:00:00 --until=<measured-date>T23:59:59 HEAD; git -C <repo> log -1 --format=%cs HEAD; ls <repo>/issues | grep '^[0-9].*\.md$'; grep -l -E '^\*\*Status\*\*: *(Closed|Done|Resolved|Fixed|Complete)' <repo>/issues/*.md | wc -l; ls <repo>/docs/studies/*.md
repositories behind spec project ids in ~/projects; private-repo filter is a safety net and matches no spec project today; missing repos reported separately; seven calendar days ending on measured date in the measuring host's local timezone; commit counts include all authors and merge commits reachable from HEAD · measured 2026-10-26
12-week commit activity
git rev-list --count --since=<Monday> --until=<Sunday> HEAD
12 latest complete ISO weeks; weekly values are from spec/metrics.yaml.