carbonyl — Chromium Browser That Renders to the Terminal

carbonyl is a Chromium-based browser that renders into terminal text — WebGL, video, and animations at ~60 FPS, 0% CPU when idle, no window server required. Works over SSH.

This fork (eSlider/carbonyl) tracks the actively maintained jmagly/carbonyl line (originally fathyb/carbonyl) and ships runnable images via ghcr.io/eslider/carbonyl.

What it is

Carbonyl started as html2svg — a path from Chromium’s render tree to terminal glyphs. Unlike headless Chrome + screenshot pipelines, it is a native terminal UI: fast startup, low idle cost, safe-mode console friendly.

Property	Value
Chromium track	M147 stable
Runtime	Verified upstream release tarballs
Images	ghcr.io/eslider/carbonyl (Docker workflow on main + v* tags)
Automation SDK	carbonyl-agent (Python)

Get started

Docker (CLI browsing)

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/eslider/carbonyl https://example.com

Python automation (recommended for scripts)

pip install carbonyl-agent
carbonyl-agent install   # verified runtime binary

from carbonyl_agent import CarbonylBrowser

b = CarbonylBrowser()
b.open("https://example.com")
b.drain(8.0)
print(b.page_text())
b.close()

For multi-instance orchestration (gRPC + REST fleet), see carbonyl-fleet.

Fork role

Most users should not build Chromium. This repo packages verified runtime tarballs into GHCR images — CI builds when Docker files change on main or on version tags.

Use cases in my stacks:

• SSH-only servers — quick page inspection without X11 forwarding
• Agent browsing — carbonyl-agent drives headless terminal sessions for scraping and testing
• Homelab ops — lightweight smoke checks from a jump host

Comparisons

Approach	Terminal-native	Idle CPU	Full Web APIs
carbonyl	Yes	~0%	Yes (Chromium)
lynx / w3m	Yes	Low	No (text browsers)
headless Chrome + imgcat	No	Higher	Yes

Related

produktor.io platform · Docker Compose patterns

Tech stack

Chromium · Rust/C++ fork · Docker · GHCR · carbonyl-agent