WASM Shell

This project of mine implements a browser-based "compute environment" with a virtual file system and terminal emulator (web shell). This setup acts as a virtual machine that emulates a Unix-like operating system and runs fully in the browser.

You can view and edit the files and create directories using the file explorer-like UI and run commands in the terminal. I built both the file explorer and terminal UI myself, with the goal to make them mobile- and touch-friendly (unlike e.g. xterm.js).

The terminal supports multiple tabs which lets you run multiple commands simultaneously. The commands are executed fully client-side and each in a separate web worker, to prevent blocking the UI thread. All tabs share the same file system which itself runs in a separate web worker.

Since the WASM builds often use synchronous APIs to interact with the file system, I implemented the inter-worker communication using SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics.

My goal is to make this project a powerful in-browser VM that can be used to run many command-line applications with no installation required.

Go ahead and try it out below!

Demo

The list of supported commands

Today, you can already run the following commands in the terminal:

Command	Description
cd	change directory (built-in command)
pdftex	pdfTeX
pdflatex	pdfLaTeX
latex	LaTeX
mf	Metafont
gs	Ghostscript
asy	Asymptote
gftodvi	GFtoDVI
dvipng	dvipng
dvips	Dvips
dvisvgm	dvisvgm
mb	MrBayes
muscle	MUSCLE
makeblastdb	makeblastdb
blastdbcmd	blastdbcmd
blastn	blastn
blastp	blastp
blastx	blastx
tblastn	tblastn
tblastx	tblastx
clustalo	Clustal Omega
praat	Praat
bowtie2-align-l	bowtie2-align-l
bowtie2-align-s	bowtie2-align-s
bowtie2-build-l	bowtie2-build-l
bowtie2-build-s	bowtie2-build-s
bowtie2-inspect-l	bowtie2-inspect-l
bowtie2-inspect-s	bowtie2-inspect-s
obabel	Open Babel