iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 14/09/2026

Not sure if I was talking to chat bot or a human, but either way I think they missed the point of what I said:

Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 06/09/2026

Just tested out my Sixel Cloud demo in the web terminal and it seems to work OK. Fair amount of data flowing across the pipe though but TBH xterm.js doesn't handle it at all (although I'm not saying this terminal is better than xterm.js at all).

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 06/09/2026

Experimenting with the idea of #hex1b having its own web-based terminal renderer that uses WebGPU. All of the terminal state stays server side with the Hex1bTerminal instance, but state updates are transmitted over the wire via a websocket to some JS code that renders onto canvas.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 05/09/2026

Turns out Sixels in Windows Terminal are pretty solid.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 03/09/2026

I'm trying to get the same simulation going in iTerm2 but can't get the scaling right.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 03/09/2026

Sixels is a pretty old school terminal graphics capability which has gotten a bit of more attention recently. Increasingly modern terminal are adopting Kitty Graphics Protocol - but there are some terminals out there that support Sixels. Here is WezTerm running a simulation.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 01/09/2026

KGP animation support in a Hex1b TUI application. The terminal in this case is Kitty (because Ghostty doesnt' support animation in the current released build). But what I am showing off here is Hex1b handling composing and animating multiple images including occlusion in the TUI framework.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 31/08/2026

Fresh terminal emulator challenge. This video shows a Hex1b app with multiple independent terminal widgets running inside the TUI framework - but the interesting thing is that KGP graphics are flowing through from the nested terminals to the outer terminal. Needed this for a feature in Aspire 13.6

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 29/08/2026

12 months ago I would never have believed that I could give a coding agent a prompt like this and expect that it would do the right thing (using #GitHub app BTW):

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 11/08/2026

Make sure you fill out the #census form for your doggos:

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 20/07/2026

That's right you little spinners ... spin ... SPIN!

Partial screenshot of GitHub App with pinned jobs running.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 02/07/2026

Sometimes I wonder about my fellow Australians: www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07...

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 13/06/2026

An even more extreme demo. This one is a Hex1bTerminal being projected as the input for a texture being applied to a plane being rendered in a Hex1b scene widget. The border around the outside is a boder widget that has been rasterized to half blocks as it was projected into the plane.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 13/06/2026

Adding some real 3D support to #hex1b tonight. But this also shows off an upcoming feature in Aspire 13.5 ... web-based Terminal support. The demo here is a TUI app built using Hex1b running under #aspire accessible via the dashboard via our new terminal emulation feature.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 10/06/2026

Have been working on a fairly large feature in #aspire for an extended period. Lots of new files, lots of iterations. Managed to really hit the limits of feature iteration with Copilot and an Opus model. About 17,000 lines added over 96 commits.

An AI generated image of a anthropomorphized coding agent being in a broken state because its context window was blown.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 30/05/2026

Doing some test deployments via our AKS integration in #aspire 13.4 and just saw this content served up from our starter template app. Whatever place this weather is for I don't want to live there! 51c is rated as "Cool" :P

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 10/05/2026

Just merged the predictive text input improvements for #hex1b. So now you can do ctx.TextBox(...).Predict(...) and it will provide predictive text in a textbox. Also removed the [ and ] bookends for textboxes and now just use the shaded effect (and auto fill to to the available space). Polishing.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/05/2026

But what if we could go the other way around. What if we wanted to use Spectre Console but there was one place where we needed to embed a Hex1b-based Widget. Well ... got that working too!

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/05/2026

After some initial success hooking up Spectre Console to Hex1bTerminal I thought I wonder if I can hook Spectre TUI up to Hex1bTerminal.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/05/2026

Lots of people in the .NET ecosystem use Spectre Console (because it is awesome) and I am sure like others they are watching the development of Spectre TUI with interest. I wondered what would happen if I attached Spectre's IAnsiConsole as a workload to #hex1b. /cc @patriksvensson.se

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 05/05/2026

@davidfowl.com nerd sniped me over the weekend with a bunch of bugs. One was a feature request to support select behavior on arbitrary areas of a #hex1b app. Here is an example of where it ended up:

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 04/05/2026

Finally got around to adding FIGlet font support to Hex1b overnight. Includes a bunch of built-in fonts as well as the ability to load v2 FIGlet fonts from a stream.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 01/05/2026

I don't know what @maddy.fm @damianedwards.com and @davidfowl.com are going to do on #aspirifridays anymore. I just tried @maddy.fm 's /aspirify skill that is shipping in Aspire 13.3 and it just one shot migrated the Mealie app to use Aspire:

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 17/04/2026

Couple of features and fixes related to #hex1b terminal widget. Firstly added the ability to scroll back. @damianedwards.com needed this for something he is cooking. Also in my testing found an escape sequence parsing bugs that was causing edit.exe not to support mouse, plus resize bugs.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 16/04/2026

AI slop warning ... but couldn't resist:

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 14/04/2026

Been cooking on some AKS support in #aspire (which builds on some vanilla K8S support which will be expanded in Aspire 13.3):

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 07/04/2026

Solved the nested terminal problem on Windows with #hex1b. This screenshot is from a build of Hex1b that has a pty proxy, shows terminals nested in terminals nested in terminals.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 22/03/2026

Slightly more involved demo including interactive widgets

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 22/03/2026

Here is a little demo I put together combining #Hex1b with another cool open-source project called Trolley. hex1b.dev github.com/weedonandsco... Learned about it from the comments to a link on HN about this example in the Ghostty org: github.com/ghostty-org/....

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 17/03/2026

@patriksvensson.se I've got Copilot writing a bug fix for Spectre Console for a bug we found in Aspire. I already told it that you don't like its type:

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 08/03/2026

I think I'm 95% of the way there with KGP support in the TUI side of #hex1b

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 07/03/2026

Working on Kitty Graphics Protocol support in #hex1b. Here is a picture of some output of one of the test cases. A few more tests at the Hex1bTerminal layer and then I can figure out the best way to make this work within the TUI abstraction and build on this strong foundation.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 06/03/2026

GitHub Copilot has been busy extending the Editor widget in #hex1b to support syntax highlighting. Here is a little taste test of where it is at.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 27/02/2026

Been experimenting with getting #hex1b to support Kitty Graphics Protocol. Very early days bat at least something is showing on the screen. I've got it working inside Hex1bTerminal itself (on this branch of the code), but this screenshot shows it flowing through from a Hex1b app (TUI framework).

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 26/02/2026

Had a go to see whether I could get @github.com Copilot to write a *.obj to braille renderer inside of Hex1b. Seemed to do already - not perfect by any stretch but not bad given the constraints. The demo has built in decimation but it's not very good.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 23/02/2026

Here is a little terminal multiplexing experiment for #hex1b. This one shows a main terminal window and a panel on the right with thumbnails which I can then drag and drop (with previews) onto the main terminal to switch between them.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 20/02/2026

#hex1b ... interactive surface rendering as a background for a Window Panel.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 19/02/2026

Here is a nice little example of what you can do with Hex1b. Over the past week I've been making some performance improvements to #Hex1b. Some big wins and lots of little optimizations - and a few more things to work on.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 15/02/2026

A big chunk of that time comes from the logic that is used to flatten the stack of surfaces before being rendered.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 15/02/2026

This is the render performance for one of the surface demos on the Hex1b website. Compared to other demos it is fairly expensive in terms of time to render frames.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/02/2026

As the #Hex1b stack gets more capable I'm needing to build out the tools so that I and coding agents can debug them. That's why I build the `hex1b app tree` command to dump out stats from running TUIs widget tree

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/02/2026

Oh! One more thing ... I'm investigating building an EditorWidget. This is a big lift so it might take a while to get into main (maybe by end of week). You can have multiple editors pointed to the same logical document and they keep in sync. You can see it supports multiple cursors!

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/02/2026

Another #hex1b widget added which I've actually build specifically for #aspire but which will be pretty useful for any .NET-based TUI is a LoggerPanel. There are a few parts of this including an extension for Microsoft.Extensions.Logging that returns a sink that can be bound to the UX.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/02/2026

I've also added a windowing system including the ability to add animated backgrounds (use with caution). This leverages the same surface rendering system from the first video.

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/02/2026

#Hex1b has also gotten some useful widgets that you see in more complex #tui systems like a TabPanelWidget and a TreeWidget. Here is a screenshot that shows off both. The TabPanel is quite flexible and composed of a TabBar that can be used independently and the ability to add icons to the tabs!

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Mitch Denny @mitchdenny.dev · 09/02/2026

Some of the other features that I've been cooking in #Hex1b. A big chunk of the weekend was building a CLI tool for Hex1b that can be used for debugging. One of the things it can do is launch terminals in the background and attach to them. You can even view them in the browser.

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