Are We Sixel Yet

https://www.arewesixelyet.com/

by ecliptik • 3 years ago

206 149 3 years ago

rbanffy2• 3 years ago

Love the idea, but Sixels are a can of worms - it’s inefficient and it’s unclear how they should map to physical pixels - most do 1:1 but I’d prefer a more historically accurate mapping similar to the original terminals that supported them. It was originally designed for dot-matrix printing and later implemented in CRT terminals.

Also, ReGIS and Tektronix (disclaimer: I proposed including Tek graphics in VTE) could also be very useful.

aa-jv• 3 years ago

how they should map to physical pixels - most do 1:1

Isn't this can of worms inherent to the subject, anyway? This question has been asked - and answered - by pretty much every rendering/display system, ever.

Seems to me, sixel adoption at this point is the pre-cursor to optimization ...

kps13• 3 years ago

Is ReGIS support uncommon? I know the terminal I use on Linux (mlterm) does, as does plain ol' xterm of course. (As an aside, it's annoying how many terminals set TERM to `xterm-256color` without being xterm compatible.)

rbanffy2• 3 years ago

I’m not sure - not many terminals advertise it. And yes - terminals lying on TERM is extremely annoying. Pretty much everything that has ever existed has a terminfo entry.

koterpillar2• 3 years ago

Does Sixel have a spec? I.e. how large are the pixels, whether there's a newline after the image (couldn't find how to turn that _off_)?

Recently discovered Kitty's graphics protocol (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/) which has more features or at least more documented ones :)

mananaysiempre5• 3 years ago

Does Sixel have a spec?

DEC invented Sixels back in the ’80s, and they were serious about their docs, so the corresponding chapter of the VT3xx manual[1] is probably as good as it gets.

I.e. how large are the pixels [...].

Historical implementations likely assume the relation between pixels and character cells that’s implied by the geometry of the DEC fonts. I’ve seen a lot of arguing about adapting this to the modern world, but I don’t know if a consensus has emerged.

[1] https://vt100.net/docs/vt3xx-gp/chapter14.html

KirillPanov• 3 years ago

No, there is an escape code that queries the window size in pixels:

    "\x1b[14t"

Combined with the escape code that queries the window size in character cells ("\x1b[18t"), you can calculate the number of pixels per character cell (the "pixel size").

koterpillar2• 3 years ago

How about the cursor position? The spec talks about "Sixel Scrolling Mode" but I couldn't find any way to display a sixel image inline: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70647549/displaying-a-si...

ziotom78• 3 years ago

It's interesting to read the discussion about Sixel support in Kitty [1], where the pros and cons of Sixel are considered in relationship with Kitty. In particular, I find this comment [2] by the maintainer of libsixel particularly intriguing:

After I took over the maintainership of libsixel I unfortunately decided it cannot support the security demands of Kitty, it is too insecure internally. I need to write a Rust library or something.

[1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2511

[2] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2511#issuecomment...

kps13• 3 years ago

Kitty is the epitome of NIH. They don't do modifyOtherKeys either.

csdvrx4• 3 years ago

Check out xterm author comments about the history of MOK: some people tried to present his works as theirs.

internetter• 3 years ago

Kitty is the epitome of NIH.

Sorry to be that guy, but what is a "NIH"? All I know is the https://www.nih.gov/ :)

kmac_• 3 years ago

Kitty term has it's own modern protocol which gets more traction.

mananaysiempre5• 3 years ago

Kitty [graphics protocol] gets more traction.

I guess that may be true in some senses, but per Nick Black[1] (of Notcurses fame) the set of Kitty graphics protocol implementations consists of Kitty and Wezterm, that’s it.

[1] https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/910#issuecomme...

traverseda• 3 years ago

Also kde's konsole.

mfeldheim• 3 years ago

What’s the point? Why would I want images in my console?

drdebug• 3 years ago

Displaying the result of a command as a graph (histograms, plots) can be more pleasant than a bunch of **** bars. An external graphic window works well too, but displaying in place can be convenient sometimes, no need to click or alt-tab.

Aardwolf2• 3 years ago

Mathematical plots, seeing the result of AI generated images, seeing the result of image compression algorithms, ...

Having these intermixed between the regular scrollable textual output is quite powerful.

TeddyDD2• 3 years ago

This is good example why: https://nitter.it/thingskatedid/status/1316074032379248640#m

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Jupyterfying the console

NeuroCoder• 3 years ago

Running MRI processing on a super computer and I want to check at a certain point in the pipeline that things went correctly by viewing a couple of slices without downloading a huge brain image

toastal• 3 years ago

I find it a lot faster to do icat previews than bother opening up an application to find & view a specific image. Even something as lightweight as feh, is still gonna open a split in my window manager which in going to be more jarring than a preview in the terminal.

flohofwoe• 3 years ago

It would allow portable graphics applications on the terminal, e.g. this C64-emulator-in-Docker only renders ASCII characters, but could be extended with sixels to render graphics (I actually tinkered with this, but didn't get far because most terminals have either none or too slow sixels support):

https://github.com/floooh/docker-c64

Myrmornis• 3 years ago

Plotting data, mathematical notation.

coderpersson• 3 years ago

This NES emulator uses Sixels for rendering games over TCP :) https://github.com/henrikpersson/potatis

ape4• 3 years ago

Cat photos in /etc/motd

qingcharles• 3 years ago

I was installing a fresh copy of Windows 10 this week and Cortana told me that once I connected to a Wifi network I'd be able to get on with browsing cat photos o_O

Microsoft has jokes.

ilammy2• 3 years ago

I have literally patched OpenSSH to show me cat pictures instead of the usual randomart.

kps13• 3 years ago

    $ mpv -vo=sixel ~/Downloads/pirated-hollywood-blockbuster.mkv

numpad0• 3 years ago

So you can browse Twitter timeline with icons on kernel console on NetBSD/m68k

omoikane• 3 years ago

Show images inline and have it scroll with other text. This is useful for working with programs that process images. For example, ImageMagick can render a PNG in the terminal like this:

   convert image.png six:-

"six" means use Sixel format, and "-" tells it to write to stdout.

Demo (running on cygwin's mintty): https://twitter.com/uguu_org/status/1631207051602042880

daliusd3• 3 years ago

Checking snapshot diffs from git repo. I would love doing that in terminal instead of opening in external app.

I have scripts that do diffing and opens results in external app, but I will replace this with in-terminal images when I will find out a way to do that.

detrites• 3 years ago

This is great but presentation has lots of repeated text, and is hard to get a full picture.

Probably work better if it was a comparison table, with ticks and crosses all in one column.

iforgotpassword• 3 years ago

This. At least add the check/cross to the table at the beginning, so you can get an idea how widespread support is. Having to scroll down is really annoying.

smasher1643• 3 years ago

Yeah, sorry about that. I threw this together with the first terminal-like Hugo theme I could find, since I wanted to focus on getting the info out there. I'd probably either have to create a custom theme, or just rewrite the site from scratch. Your point is noted though--others have brought this up.

Aardwolf2• 3 years ago

Sixels are cool. There's one thing I wish konsole would do better: if you draw a sixel image, and then zoom in/out, the image should also zoom in/out. It should scale the sixel graphics and the regular text the same way.

And the kitty protocol also supported by konsole has the exact same issue last time I tried, doesn't zoom in.

csdvrx4• 3 years ago

Works in mintty on Windows: just install msys2 and try it.

It's a simple feature, considering mintty was built on top of putty

RustyRussell• 3 years ago

For those who like me had no idea what a sixel was: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

TeddyDD2• 3 years ago

See also rant[1] of sixel-tmux author.

It's 2021, and we should be able to do litterate programming in the console, with full graphical support.

Yeah. We are stuck cosplaying computers from the sixties.

What's even funnier, even if you find a modern terminal emulator that supports features like ligatures, graphics, emoji etc. you still will be blocked by tmux. Sure - not everyone needs tmux. If you never work on remote machines, you can live without it.

But I work on remote machines all the time. I also use Kakoune text editor that defers window management to external tools (WM or tmux, but to be honest, tmux is much better). Zellij is more of r/unixporn bait than usable tool for now. So I'm stuck with text only interface.

[1] https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/blob/main/RANTS.md

sgt2• 3 years ago

Never got into tmux, still using screen after all these years. Is tmux still claimed to be superior?

tambourine_man2• 3 years ago

Does screen offer vertical splitting now? That was the killer feature for me a decade ago. And the more Vimlike keybindings.

pengaru2• 3 years ago

screen is gpl, tmux isn't

shrimp_emoji• 3 years ago

I use emojis on tmux. I don't think it conflicts with them. :o

You just have to have an emoji font installed (Twemoji, of course). And I use Alacritty, a Rust-based, GPU-accelerated terminal editor. How's that for "modern"? :sunglasses:

vanderZwan2• 3 years ago

Eh, Terminology has more features, and on my machine if I run tree from the home folder it's finished quicker than anything else I've tried.

https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology.md

syrrim2• 3 years ago

You need to configure it properly or pass the -u flag for it to support unicode I believe.

kps13• 3 years ago

For those like me with the opposite inclinations, try dtach. It is only a session handler. It does not pretend to be a terminal, or do splits or tabs or anything but I/O. That's left to your actual terminal.

mananaysiempre5• 3 years ago

How does that work?

I mean, you could avoid knowing anything about the terminal state machine if you dumped the entirety of the session’s bytestream from the very beginning on each attach event, but unless you are willing to do that it seems to me that you’re going to have to track enough state to basically amount to maintaining a screen buffer (and then you do have to care about sixels).

For example, suppose the user fills the screen (maybe even with an image), then spends a lot of bytes overwriting the last line over and over (think progress bar). Either you’re tracking the first byte to have affected the current screen (and need to store the entirety of the “a lot” and dump it onto a newly attached client) or you’re trying to discard all the stale updates while keeping the last one and the initial screen contents (and that’s just a screen buffer with extra steps). (Incidentally, I suspect Muratori’s Refterm fails this test to the point of requiring a redesign, though I haven’t checked.)

behnamoh• 3 years ago

do splits or tabs or anything but I/O. That's left to your actual terminal.

I use tmux exactly to split panels in any way I want. My terminal (iTerm2) doesn't give me the full power to manipulate windows/panels using shortcuts.

But unfortunately I'm gonna have to stop using tmux because it's not compatible with sixel. I spent a lot of time ricing it tho...

diarrhea• 3 years ago

I simply open multiple ssh sessions if that’s what’s needed. My terminal can then natively do tabs, panes, ligatures, emojis etc. There’s no middleman.

So after all these years I still managed to not need tmux. Am I missing out? Everyone seems to be using it.

smolder• 3 years ago

I got in the habit of using GNU screen and so have never used tmux. But if you have a long-running text UI program (e.g. irssi) you want to be able to connect to on a whim and pass around to multiple client sessions, they're handy for that.

bombcar• 3 years ago

tmux is one of those things that is nice if you take the time to learn and actually USE it for awhile.

But it doesn’t have amazing uses that immediately make you say “wow”. The biggest I’ve found is setting up something on a remote server and being able to disconnect it. For example it can be much nicer for running a Minecraft server than daemonizing.

jimbobimbo• 3 years ago

The best use case of tmux for me is Azure Cloud Console, where there is no good way/cumbersome to open multiple sessions at once.

__MatrixMan__2• 3 years ago

I felt the same way, but ended up learning tmux because you can't make asciinema span multiple tabs or panes, and sometimes you want to make an asciicast with more than one shell.

It's handy to know sometimes, but if I have a sane window manager at hand then I don't use tmux. They're not common, sane window managers, so I use it occasionally.

yonrg2• 3 years ago

That's by far a different work experience. Imagine to start a long running process on remote, probably after hopping through a number of different machines. The long running process should not get killed. This is not possible to guarantee on ssh connections.

Similar, I keep all my work alive in remote sessions in tmux. Vim IDE, mutt, ... I would not want to re start this everyday. The best part is, I can reach my setup from office and from home and mobile. And if necessary even from my phone.

daliusd3• 3 years ago

For me personally tmux giver minor improvements (some of them are done by some terminals, some are not), e.g.:

* Text selection using variuos shortcuts (usually I use it only for URL):

https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-copycat

* FZF autocompletion from output, e.g. in case I want to diff some file I see changed in `git status`:

https://github.com/laktak/extrakto

ingenieroariel• 3 years ago

I have been trying out a kakoune arcan frontend [1] with the intention to use it over the network along with cat9 [2].

[1] https://github.com/cipharius/kakoune-arcan [2] https://github.com/letoram/cat9

dbdoskey• 3 years ago

Have a look at zellij, just as good if not better than tmux (imho obviously), and has support for sixels and much more.

sundarurfriend2• 3 years ago

zellij is amazing in terms of UI/UX, but in my experience not as stable as the older options. Which is understandable, screen and tmux have had decades to sort things out, but it does mean that given the general messiness and complexity of remote network connections (which is the most common use case), running into these rough edges is not difficult at all.

I feel like zellij is the future of terminal multiplexers, and I like using it in my personal machines, but I stopped using it for work after a while.

daliusd3• 3 years ago

I have tried zellij and it is not yet for me:

* Can't move tabs (fixed position)

* sixel support with iterm2 is meh. Yes, it shows image, but it does not look good.

* Support for undercurl seems to be missing.

* I need to sacrifice some other functionality I have in tmux.

Yes, I get some extras but it is not ready yet for me personally.

kragen7• 3 years ago

not sure how cosplaying as a vt340+ or a late 90s japanese cellphone is supposed to be an improvement?

loose coupling via byte streams is great, and so is text, but we can do better than character cell terminals

if you sacrifice textuality, xpra does reattachment, multiwindow, and lowish bandwidth pretty well

csdvrx4• 3 years ago

Author of sixel-tmux (and of the matching rant) here.

Your description of sixels using words like 'cosplaying' or 'late 90s japanese cellphone' is not very technical. It seems biased. In any case, it would be better than being stuck with the 60s "text only" VT100 like protocols.

We can talk about technicalities, as some people do not like how sixels work under the hood, but... they work fine: I can play video in my terminals. I use gnuplot everyday.

Could it be done better by a protocol that would use compression and other features? Maybe. But does it have to be? Why should we waste time reinventing the wheel when locally there's plenty of bandwidth, and remotely too often enough?

Personally, I like sixels because prefer a standard that is well defined, and can't change on someone whim: I like stable interfaces.

I think users are unfairly held back due to biases like the one you demonstrated, and that seem very common in the free software world, which was the point of my rant: there is no logical reason sixels couldn't be offered today in gnome terminal if the key people making sure that doesn't happen changed their mind.

mnky9800n• 3 years ago

I just use screens but I guess tmux is better in every way

derekzhouzhen• 3 years ago

For working on remote machines, I need 3 things:

* show multiple terminals on screen. The best solution is to use a tiling window manager. Both MacOS and Windows have limited windows tiling capabilities. * run long term TUI applications (like editors). The best solution is mosh. * run long term CLI applications (like shells). The best solution is dtach.

tmux helps all 3, but not particular good at either.

slim2• 3 years ago

it's good at the first point. if you use a tiling wm you are not multiplexing the remote connection, or am I missing something?

messe• 3 years ago

tmux helps all 3, but not particular good at either.

iTerm2 on macOS has some nice tmux integration[1]. Basically, you run a tmux session (using tmux -CC), but the actual window management on the client side is handled by iTerm2. This works pretty nicely with the tiling WM (Amethyst[2]) I use on macOS.

If anybody is aware of Wayland compositors that integrate similarly, please let me know. I'd love to be able to do the same on my linux machines.

[1] https://iterm2.com/documentation-tmux-integration.html

[2] https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

Per_Bothner• 3 years ago

I think DomTerm (in addition handling sixels and extended emoji) does multi-plexing and remoting quite well. Remote access (https://domterm.org/Remoting-over-ssh.html) is done with a simple wrapper over ssh. Mosh-style predictive echo. No special priviliges needed: Just drop a domterm executable somewhere on the remote machine. Multiplexing with tabs and tiles that can be dragged between windows. Builtin attach/detach.

opan• 3 years ago

Sure - not everyone needs tmux. If you never work on remote machines, you can live without it.

I'd rather not live without it even on local stuff. It's way too good. Yes, I already use a tiling wm, and no it's not the same.

3np2• 3 years ago

https://github.com/topcat001/tmux/tree/sixel

This is a more promising and updated sixel branch of tmux, which is slowly getting updates propagated to mainline.

snvzz• 3 years ago

OP should have linked the page as-is, without the #terminalapp part of the URL.

Do not assume my terminal!

pohl2• 3 years ago

I think it's fair to call Terminal.app out especially, though. It's in sore need of an uplift in many ways — with True Color support being another annoying example. In a few weeks at WWDC we'll find out if they've ignored it again for another year.

Kwpolska• 3 years ago

Or you could just use iTerm and ignore the built-in app (do you try to use TextEdit to edit code as well?)

sundarurfriend2• 3 years ago

Probably unintentional. People often click into subsections of the page and then submit their current URL as it is, without realizing they're linking to a subsection of the page.

jackhalford• 3 years ago

This would be amazing to implement a jupyter kernel natively in the terminal!! can’t wait

anonacct37• 3 years ago

I'm excited to tell you it already exists with kitty and euporie https://github.com/joouha/euporie

QuadrupleA• 3 years ago

Shouldn't you just use a web browser or a GUI at some point, if you're trying to do graphics? Adding bitmaps seems like feature creep, muddying the whole purpose and appeal of the terminal.

Next you'll want accessibility, alt text for blind readers, DPI awareness, responsive scaling on different screens, etc.

gary_0• 3 years ago

I agree we should tread carefully regarding feature creep, but it's already very common to display graphical data in the terminal with ASCII art or Unicode. Adding basic bitmaps would remove the need for those hacks.

Convenient terminal tools already exist for viewing formatted text like Markdown or HTML, or viewing binary data like ELF files, or showing live dashboards like htop... but images still require launching a separate application. And this is all data that you might produce while working solely within the terminal--only to have to visit GUI land to see what's in a PNG file. It's a pretty obvious gap.

IshKebab• 3 years ago

I don't think so. There are plenty of terminal based programs that would clearly benefit from proper graphics. And doing it in the terminal means you don't have to set up a second connection, e.g. when you're using SSH.

That said it's disappointing that the best we can do is Sixel, a hilariously inefficient and ancient format.

JdeBP2• 3 years ago

If this is feature creep at all, this is very old feature creep. It happened in 1981, when the ability to do graphics, actually available on some specialized terminals from the decade before, became mainstream in the world of character mode terminals, when DEC put Sixel and ReGIS into its VT range.

It has been in XTerm since the 20th century, and terminal emulators for MS/PC/DR-DOS like Reflection gained Sixel support somewhere around 1989.

Don't be fooled into thinking that "the terminal" is what one can do on the kernel virtual terminals of Linux, FreeBSD, or SCO Xenix. The reality is that the massive reinvention wave of the 1990s and 2000s has actually lost you functionality that was in real, hardware, terminals and contemporary terminal emulation programs of the 1980s, and given those who never lived it a very blinkered idea of terminal functionality based upon 1960s TeleType terminals that was a little outdated even when Unix itself was invented.

ok123456• 3 years ago

Missing mlterm

kps13• 3 years ago

There are two of us! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34373035

It's there: https://www.arewesixelyet.com/#mlterm

pimlottc• 3 years ago

Please, let's move away from red and green as "good"/"bad" colors. It's hard to tell the difference for colorblind folks, especially when the symbols used are quite similar.

robertlagrant• 3 years ago

It's useful, though:

Green: moral

Red: immoral

Red green colourblind: amoral

noizejoy• 3 years ago

That makes me wonder, if it should be solved client side by translating server side colours to something different on the client, according to the user’s needs.

mk_stjames• 3 years ago

There are absolutely solutions that do exactly that client side (just mapping the colors from the hard-to-tell-apart hues to other hues depending on which type of color blindness).

For instance, in Mac OS, under Accessibility there are 'Color Filters' with a dropdown for presets for a few common types of colorblindness including red/green. It is a filter that is applied systemwide at the graphic output level.

I think this is the proper approach (device-level color filtering) versus each app attempting to serve all, as that could lead to double-filtering.

smasher1643• 3 years ago

Sorry about this. I assumed that checkmark/cross would compensate for this color combination, but I agree that better colors would make this more accessible for everyone. From what I'm reading online, Blue / Red is a better combination here?

amluto3• 3 years ago

This led to a rabbit hole. Here’s kitty’s competing protocol:

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/

Look at the “The transmission medium” section. I’m reasonably familiar with what can go wrong when messing with files you shouldn’t mess with on Linux, I’ve worked on the various security mechanisms that can help, and I would not want to implement this. If someone wanted me to consult on implementing this, my advice would be, first and foremost, not to.

There isn’t even a “security considerations” section in the document!

syncsynchalt• 3 years ago

Since your comment is (was) topmost, I want to clarify that while kitty seems to have an overlarge attack surface, Sixel doesn't seem bad at all.

There's an escape code to enter "sixel" mode, then base64-style data representing 1x6 pixel bitmaps, then an escape code to get back out.

No vector graphics that might overdraw unexpectedly (security considerations!), no mechanism for out-of-band data (security considerations!), no unproven compression libraries (security considerations!), but also none of the extra magic that something like kitty would provide.

I could live happily with Sixel being universally supported in my terminal emulators.

amluto3• 3 years ago

I could live happily with Sixel being universally supported in terminal emulators.

Me too!

If I want fast graphics from a local application, there are a couple of widely available ways to make it work. X11 and Wayland come to mind :)

aumerle2• 3 years ago

FUD as usual. I am so sick of people waving around the security word. If you are scared of dealing with files on Linux, I suggest you throw your computer in the garbage and retire to a mountain fastness with no electricity. If you have a specific criticism of the kitty protocol make it, otherwise spare us the vague FUD.

amluto3• 3 years ago

You connect your terminal to a program (pts, which may map to a sandbox or a remote SSH server you don’t trust or just a file you feed to cat). And it contains an escape sequence that causes your terminal to read and process ~/.ssh/id_rsa or /etc/shadow or /dev/sda or /proc/self/something or some other wildly inappropriate object. And your terminal opens and reads the file.

My terminal does not live in a mountain fastness, and it’s not as exposed as a web browser, but it should at least try to make it safe to feed it untrustworthy input.

__MatrixMan__2• 3 years ago

I was sad to see that alacritty doesn't support it. I like their vim-selection-mode (even if it is missing a few movements).

I'd like to play with terminal graphics in a an app I'm working on. Does anybody know if a terminal which supports:

- wayland - sixel - copying substrings without a mouse

I know I can just pipe to wl-copy, but sometimes the right chain of sed & awk is less convenient than the right chain of vim highlight movements.

the_gipsy4• 3 years ago

I am using alacritty with a sixel patch. Sadly, the maintainers aren't interested in supporting sixel or kitty graphics.

cycomanic• 3 years ago

IIRC we term can do it. I was an alacritty/kitty user for quite a while, but have since moved to wezterm because it is just more pleasant to use. I did see some crashes for a while but they seem to be fixed now.

busfahrer• 3 years ago

FWIW, it might be worth mentioning in this context that iTerm 2 also has its own protocol for displaying pixels, so you can cat images in the terminal using an "imgcat" script that they offer for download:

https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html

kps13• 3 years ago

That is also supported by some other terminals; at least mlterm and Konsole handle it.

smasher1643• 3 years ago

I was debating whether or not I should mention iTerm's image protocol, since iTerm already supports SIXEL.

JdeBP2• 3 years ago

For the record: My terminal emulator does not do sixel, and providing that or any other graphics mechanism is not a design goal, and not in keeping with the internal mechanics of storing the terminal display as an array of character code points. The terminal emulators that my terminal emulator is designed to supplant, the kernel built-in emulators of Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and indeed SCO Unix, don't do sixel graphics.

This is not to say that I am against sixel. As someone who was doing graphics on terminals in the 1980s, sometimes by accident when I catted the wrong file, the idea that "terminals don't do graphics" seems blinkered and ahistoric to me. They do and did, in my direct experience. I'm simply not targetting that as a feature in a program that has the specific goal of matching specific kernel built-in emulators. You know where XTerm is if you want it. (-:

On the gripping hand, my terminal emulator does Unicode (as do several of the kernel built-in ones, albeit with severe limitations), and so all of the things that one can do with Unicode pseudo-graphics are possible on it, from MouseText windows through progress bars using the 1/8th block glyph set to PC-style line drawing.

Aerbil313• 3 years ago

Why do I smell another “just adding more capability…” thing turning into an OS? Maybe only for devs? Sure there’s a long way, but I see it coming. This time without DOM.

schappim• 3 years ago

Today I learned about Terminal Graphics Protocol (an alternative to Sixel):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940691

RupertEisenhart• 3 years ago

I just started using this! I'm making a tool called command-line-maps, its gonna be amazing.

Echoing another comment here, it doesn't work in tmux though which is pretty heartbreaking. But viewing beautiful maps in the terminal is amazing, and works perfectly.

(I'm using the alacritty branch that supports it, worked perfectly.)

shmerl2• 3 years ago

Any example echo command to test it?

kps13• 3 years ago

HN isn't putting this on one line, but

  echo $'\EP0;0;0q"1;1;6;6#0;2;100;0;100#1;2;0;0;100#2;2;0;100;100#3;2;0;100;0#4;2;100;100;0#5;2;100;0;0#6;2;100;100;100#7;2;0;0;0#0!6_$#1!6O$#2!6G$#3!6C$#4!6A$#5!6@-\E\\'

shmerl2• 3 years ago

That works, thanks.

Are We Sixel Yet

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