Show HN: I wrote a "web OS" based on the Apple Lisa's UI, with 1-bit graphics
70 comments
·July 6, 2025ayaros
The Lisa doesn't have square pixels, so the canvas is scaled to be 1.5x as high as it is wide. This generally looks fine on high-dpi displays, because there's technically twice as much space to render with (pixels are 2px wide by 3px high). However, things will look distorted on a lower resolution display (where pixels are 1px wide by 1.5px high). That's just a compromise I made when designing this.
The good news is, if you have a large enough low-dpi display, and you make the window big enough, the automatic integer scaling settings will kick in, and the pixels themselves will be displayed larger. This can be forced via the preferences app (under the display options). If you screw this up, then restart LisaGUI while holding the shift key to reset the scaling settings.
EDIT: Unrelated to this, there are a couple minor bugs with PWAs on iOS relating to the positioning of the canvas. These can be resolved by rotating your device to a different orientation and then rotating it back to the original position... but this is annoying.
EDIT 2: To close windows, just double click the icon in the titlebar! This "collapses the window back into an icon."
ivape
How do you handle dynamic window/font scaling regardless of browser size (you get it for free with html mostly).
rustystump
These are the kinds of show hn I live for. Tasty vanilla js + learning about an esoteric "Lisa GUI" well before my time. Bravo!
I would love to see a breakout style game or something in the demo/examples but that is my inner child speaking.
ayaros
Thank you. That means a lot to me!
That's a good game idea. The next game I'm going to do will be solitaire. I was also thinking of trying to eventually make something like the mazewar game from the Xerox Alto to pay my respects to Xerox, although I know that will be an undertaking, especially adding in networking...
Avshalom
> Author's note: I pronounce the letters in GUI separately. Why would you ever pronounce it "gooey?" Please don't do that. Just don't.
Solidarity!
wpm
We should pronounce all acronyms/initialisms.
TUI = tooey
CLI = clee
TCP/IP = tickipip
GPT = gipity
DNS = dunce
HTTP = Hittup
USB = Oosbuh
USB-C = Oosbuhc
ayaros
This is pure evil
ayaros
Thankfully someone agrees with me!
Avshalom
There! Are! Dozens! Of! Us!
(actually there's a shit ton of us who learned computers via text and pronounce things correctly)
ayaros
YES
bbarnett
Initialisms are just that!
Otherwise, how can you tell snmp from sntp from smtp!
johnklos
...because fighting about silly things that are just fun to poke each other about is much more fun than fighting about things like politics in this day and age...
vi versus emacs, vi versus vim, (guh sound)IF versus (j sound)IF, m68k versus x86, Mac versus Amiga, BSD versus Linux, et cetera.
ayaros
Yes, I know right! Imagine what kind of beautiful world we could live in if we spent trillions of dollars on this instead of the military industrial complex!
bbarnett
Where I grew up, in the 80s, it was a toss between a mouse and trackball for people. Same sort of arguments.
I kind of like both.
jonathanlydall
Very cool.
Something I recommend doing for the mouse cursor on mobile is to make it work like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop on iOS (possibly Android too, but I’m an iPhone user so don’t know for sure) where the cursor isn’t where you tap on the screen, but you kind of pan anywhere on the screen which proportionally moves the cursor which is somewhere not under your finger. It’s a bit hard to explain, you just need to try using RDP on Microsoft’s free Windows App on your mobile device.
ayaros
Thanks. And yes, I did that! Under preferences, go to the touchscreen options panel, then enable trackpad mode!
john-aj
That is surprisingly pleasant to use, actually!
ayaros
Yes, one thumb on each side works great in landscape mode. Eventually I'll have to add some UI feedback to this mode when toggling it on or off, which shouldn't be too hard to do with a little CSS since the trackpad and button are just div elements overlaid on top of the canvas.
rgovostes
The shadow text style and fatbits editor in the Preferences app really took me back. Other than a lack of close buttons on windows, it's remarkable that you can strip away 40 years of UX "innovation" and the result is still productive and intuitive.
(Edit: Menus staying open after one click was a welcome improvement that I think came much later.)
ayaros
Yes, sticky menus arrived much later. I put the extra effort to add them here because everyone's so used to them now. Both options work - you can single-click to keep a menu open, or you can hold down the mouse and drag to open a menu which closes when you release the mouse.
There's at least one Mac extension I know of that lets you use sticky menus on earlier versions of Mac OS, like System 6. I figured I'd backport that feature a little further, so to speak...
EDIT: Also, forgot to mention it in this reply, but you double click the titlebar icon to close the window.
layer8
You can double-click on the icon in the top left corner of a window to close it. (Which, I guess, is just the shorthand for File > Set Aside.)
ayaros
Yes.
Setting aside specifically places something on the desktop. Save-able documents have a "save and put away" option which "refiles" it back in its folder without putting it on the desktop.
You made me realize I still need to add a separate "put away" option on all windows regardless, so there's always a menu command that can be used to refile something.
The desktop isn't a normal directory - I discuss this in the readme a bit.
Cieric
This is pretty cool and it's surprising how well it works on mobile. I think the shuffle puzzle game has a bug where it can generate unsolvable puzzles. I ran into a parity issue. I solved it with the blank in the upper left but got no response from the game so I don't believe that was the intended solution.
Also checked with an online solver and it verified that there was no solution.
ayaros
I haven't gone as far as verifying puzzles are solvable - right now I only verify the state of the puzzle is valid. Maybe in the future. For now I guess it will be like solitaire, where if you can't solve it you'll have to reshuffle it.
Incidentally, I'm planning on adding solitaire as the next game!
Cieric
Oh nice. I don't actually know how to play solitaire, but I know Microsoft used the method of randomly generating them, solving them and then saving solvable seeds. (I believe they had 2 that weren't solvable somehow though so maybe it was a human solving them and it was a typo or mistake)
Also, I was just checking around to see if there were any good methods for telling if a puzzle is solvable without solving it. Seems geeks for geeks have some code for it.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/check-instance-15-puzzle-s... The only other solution I can think of is detecting both configurations (blank in bottom right or top left) and displaying something when either is reached.
Shorel
I remember making that puzzle in C++.
Half of the random states created are solvable, and the other half are unsolvable.
My solution was not checking if the puzzle is solvable (the mathematics of this seem complicated), but starting with a solved one and then do a fixed number of random movements.
ayaros
That's a good idea.
mysterydip
I'm on mobile so only able to try a couple things, but impressed with how responsive it is! Thanks for sharing
ayaros
Thanks for looking!
sfblah
So I played the puzzle game on this Lisa and it appears unsolvable to me, which sort of surprised me. Has anyone else given it a shot?
Here's a picture of how far I got: https://imgur.com/a/QhnnC4X
Shorel
If it is randomly generated, half of the puzzles are unsolvable.
ayaros
Oh, it's totally solvable, but it's tricky! You kind of have to strategically "snake" the letters around a bit to sequentially place them in the right spots - you get less and less room to do so as you place more and more tiles.
phyzix5761
Yeah, I was able to solve it
fitsumbelay
very cool, plus so much tasty design and functional tips that spark inspiration. I really love that look of aliased type that still reaches for that calligraphic look that's _just_ beyond the GUI's capacity to display. Nostalgia shmacking me in the taste buds with this one ...
ayaros
Yes. The text styles were fun to do. They aren't implemented the same way QuickDraw does it, but it's close enough.
hackyhacky
How did you research this? Do you own a Lisa?
ayaros
Yes I do, a Lisa 2/10! LisaEm was also invaluable. Also, just a general obsession with vintage computers and UIs helped quite a bit!
layer8
There are Lisa emulators out there: https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Apple_Lisa_emul.... And you can find ROMs on macintoshrepository.org.
smokel
Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but the line widths in the characters are quite inconsistent. For example the two l's in "install" have different widths. This makes something pretty amazing look slightly disappointing.
(Tested in Firefox and Chrome on desktop.)
ayaros
I'll take a closer look at this. Might be a kerning issue.
EDIT: I'm honestly not sure what this issue might be... If you're up for sending me a screenshot, there's an email link at the bottom of https://yaros.ae/.
https://lisagui.com/info.html
This is a web OS I wrote in vanilla JS that looks like the Apple Lisa Office System (1983-85), with other contemporaneous influences and additional improvements and features. It's currently in alpha and isn't remotely bug free. I had been holding off on posting this here until it was somewhat presentable and useful. Please note; the Lisa conforms more literally to the desktop metaphor than most modern GUIs - some of the important differences are mentioned in the readme.
This is a complete recreation of the UI in JS; it all renders to a single canvas element. It's not a CSS theme, and not an emulator ported to JS. None of the code is written by Apple. I'll be happy to elaborate more in the comments, but the short version is the entire UI is defined outside the DOM using JS objects. Thus, every interface element - menus, windows, controls, and even typefaces - was recreated from scratch. There are no font files - I wrote my own typesetting system, which supports combining multiple text styles and generates new glyph variants on the fly.
Many of the technical decisions I made were motivated by a desire to have this look the same in every browser. That's harder to do with the DOM and CSS, and why I moved as much logic as I could to JS. Also, the only part of the project outside of vanilla JS and standard web APIs is the Gulp toolkit, which I'm using as a minification/build tool. No vibe coding was used to make this!
This is based on a UI from the 80s, and won't work well on your phone. If you insist on running it that way, turn on trackpad mode in the touchscreen settings panel of the preferences app. For best results, install it as a PWA (add it to your home screen). Also there are some odd Android bugs; the native touchscreen keyboard is currently broken, and there's an issue with the cursor when dragging windows.
I realize there's not a whole lot to do within LisaGUI right now; I've got a big list of additional features and apps I'll be adding in the future. I've been working on this project for a while, and I'm eager to hear people's feedback and answer questions about it.