Libsixel: The new standard of SIXEL development – graphics in the terminal

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

by vmorgulis • 10 years ago

104 20 10 years ago

github.com

vmorgulis3• 10 years ago

The real home page: http://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/

Wikipedia on Sixels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

jaxb• 10 years ago

Why not go farther back in time, to BBN BitGraph? :-) There's a DVI previewer and netpbm converter for it, gnuplot supports those as well -- http://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvibit, http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtobbnbg.html and http://www.gnuplot.info/docs_4.2/node423.html

vmorgulis3• 10 years ago

Very cool and even more confidential technology ;-)

kristianp• 10 years ago

Related old discussion on Rich Command Shells https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436309

striking• 10 years ago

This is really neat, but isn't it super inefficient? The color quality is pretty poor and I'm fairly certain it can't take advantage of hardware acceleration.

It's neat to put graphics on your old DEC terminals, it's cool to have as a hack. But re-implementing it into new tech?

I dunno. I'd really like to see an mmap'd YUV or RGB buffer in the terminal being read from a pipe/file/memory area, because I feel like that might be a little more efficient. Or, hell, what if we got a straight up GL context? That could seriously be interesting.

voltagex_• 10 years ago

A GL context sounds cool, although at what point are you just reimplementing a DWM inside xterm?

nona• 10 years ago

Wouldn't wayland be the right thing™ for this kind of stuff? Basically have the terminal become a wayland (sub)compositor, with some commands to set up buffers to write to.

qwertyuiop924• 10 years ago

No, wayland would be Good and Wrong™. It would be very nice and kind of elegant... And Linux only. Adding support for it upstack (i.e. SDL) was the Bad and Right™ thing to do. And nobody wants another implementation of X.

vidarh2• 10 years ago

What I want is outputting an image from a remote server onto my terminal, or ending a pipe with feeding the output from "uniq -c" or something to a script creating an inline graph etc.

The page focuses on showing the limits of it, but there are lots of small little cases where being able to output graphics to the terminal in otherwise predominantly textual applications is great, but not great enough to justify a more complicated solution.

being read from a pipe/file/memory area

And now you've lost network transparency to gain efficiency that wasn't needed in the first place.

mhd2• 10 years ago

With pixel graphics, we're kinda back in blit/Oberon territory and with vector graphics, you'd basically be doing Tektronix 2.0.

The latter had some merits because your whole system was a terminal, but I don't quite get what this gets us in a system where you can have as many graphics contexts as you want anyway. Especially if the rest of the window where this graphics is embedded is ancient constrained technology.

I'm not a big fan of the Bell school of tech, but I definitely understand Rob Pike's source of pride in testifying that he never wrote a cursor-controlled terminal app...

vmorgulis3• 10 years ago

I'm not a big fan of the Bell school of tech, but I definitely understand Rob Pike's source of pride in testifying that he never wrote a cursor-controlled terminal app...

Did he use his own terminal at that time ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_%28computer_terminal%29

vidarh2• 10 years ago

Do you also wonder what it gets us to be able to inline pictures in webpages?

Because that is the main benefit: Being able to inline graphics in an otherwise mostly textual interface.

There are a great many situations where I want to work on the command line, and I mostly want to work on text, but occasionally would like to output graphics. X forwarding is great and lets me opt to spawn an image viewer instead, but it's awfully limiting. For starters, it means you have text one place and the image somewhere else, which is fine if they are fully separate, but annoying if the image and text are providing context to each other and especially if you want multiple images. Being able to augment tool output with simple graphics, to me, is of similar utility to syntax highlighting and other colour use in the terminal.

E.g. consider being able to easily list a directory on a remote server and inline thumbnails without having to start a file manager via X forwarding.

I'd loathe for people to start writing graphics heavy applications as terminal apps with graphics, or for people to start requiring a pointing device for them, but there's a lot of small uses that can make the command line a lot more pleasant.

otabdeveloper1• 10 years ago

it can't take advantage of hardware acceleration.

I'm sure that blitting sprites pixel-by-pixel to the screen is much faster without hardware acceleration.

Hardware acceleration only makes sense if you're doing vector/3D graphics or running complex video decoding algorithms.

rcarmo• 10 years ago

Regretfully, iTerm doesn't support this, and it's bitmap support hasn't made it out of beta yet.

(also, I can't run the new betas, probably because they're not properly signed)

bryanrasmussen• 10 years ago

so, could I use this with my linode?

dsr_• 10 years ago

Yes, but there are relatively few use cases where it wouldn't be better to run X over NX or VNC or Spice, all of which you should be able to do easily.

wund• 10 years ago

It's very exciting to see inline plots in terminal but I doubt it will ever get mainstream popularity since it's not supported by most terminals.

Kristine1975• 10 years ago

If you only need to display a simple graph you could try Unicode's Braille characters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776112

That should be supported by more terminals.

xvilka• 10 years ago

This is partially related - support of RGB colors (True Colors, 24bit colors) in various terminals: https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728

Libsixel: The new standard of SIXEL development – graphics in the terminal

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