ychrome

ychrome is a web viewport for the Yggdrasil ecosystem, and the pilot app for libyggterm — the pattern where a program launched in a yggterm terminal takes over yggterm's GUI surfaces.

Quick start

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yggdrasilhq/yggterm/main/scripts/install.sh | sh
ynpx @ygghq/ychrome

The design

The primary UX is locality by invocation:

# in a yggterm terminal connected to machine `dev`
$ ychrome http://localhost:8000

The yggterm viewport for that session becomes a browser showing dev's localhost:8000. No flags, no tunnels to think about, no "which machine am I on" bookkeeping — where you typed the command is where the URL resolves. Closing ychrome (Ctrl+C, or closing the surface) hands the viewport back to the terminal.

Under the hood, ychrome is a thin client: it finds the local yggterm host daemon, asks it to open a web surface for the calling session, and blocks in the foreground while the surface is alive. The daemon relays the request to the attached yggterm GUI; the GUI swaps the session viewport to a webview and routes localhost traffic back to the session's machine over the existing ssh substrate. The right sidebar belongs to ychrome while it runs (profiles, navigation, page info).

Standalone fallback

Outside yggterm (a plain desktop, a bare xterm), ychrome degrades to opening its own window:

ychrome https://chat.example.com --profile work
ychrome https://chat.example.com --profile personal

--profile gives each name an isolated persistent storage (cookies, logins), so multiple accounts on the same site coexist — each profile is its own host-owned session jar under ~/.yggterm/web-profiles/<name> (the same jar the yggterm viewport uses, so a profile means one identity whether ychrome renders it standalone or hands it to yggterm).

--via <ssh-host> exists only in standalone mode: browse with that machine's network identity (its localhost, its internal DNS, its routes) when no yggterm is in the loop:

ychrome --via dev http://localhost:8000

Inside yggterm this flag is unnecessary by design — running ychrome in a session already connects directly on that session's machine (the egress rule in docs/architecture.md).

Profile picker (no arguments)

Run ychrome with no URL and it shows a profile picker instead of a blank page:

# in a yggterm session
ychrome

It serves a small picker page on a loopback port and points the yggterm viewport at it — a card per existing profile plus a URL/search field. Pick a profile and type a URL (or leave it blank to start on search); ychrome then opens that URL under that profile in the viewport. This is the natural entry point for the multi-account use case: one command, choose which identity to browse as. (The picker is thin-client only; standalone ychrome with no URL still opens a blank window.)

Status

Working end-to-end as of yggterm 2.9.53. Live-verified: ychrome http://localhost:8377 in a yggterm session on a remote machine rendered that machine's loopback-only dev server in the viewport, with egress on that machine, and Ctrl+C handed the terminal back. Standalone window mode also works. Contract: docs/protocol.md (authoritative copy in yggterm's docs/web-surfaces.md).

Docs

• Product direction
• Architecture
• Surface protocol

License

• source code: GPL-3.0-or-later — the browser ships a compiled derivative of nine GPL/CC-BY-SA filter lists
• crates/ychrome-vault and crates/ychrome-vault-proto: Apache-2.0 — they are reusable infrastructure, not browser code
• repository documentation (*.md) and skills: CC BY-SA 4.0

See LICENSE (the full GPL-3.0 text), LICENSE-CC-BY-SA-4.0, and NOTICE.

Contributions need a signed CLA, because this project is also licensed commercially. See CONTRIBUTING.md and CLA.md — it is a page, you keep your copyright, and it takes one line to sign.