dtach VS xserver-SIXEL

ssh from your favourite terminal to your workstation works fine. (I spent two COVID years working that way.) If you use multiple terminals, look up ssh multiplexing to improve performance a bit. If you want to keep remote sessions alive without mucking up your preferred terminal, try dtach.

Not the same, but I really dig using vim (neovim) as my terminal multiplexer. Vim has tools for managing windows, splits, all the things, and it felt redundant having two separate tools.

The one thing I needed was a way to attach/detach it, and have it survive across ssh disconnects. I struggled for a while trying to use things like reptyr or others. Eventually I remembered/rediscovered dtach, which is a very thin very simple proxy, as opposed to a full on terminal emulator / multiplexer. https://github.com/crigler/dtach

Not really, and for what TRAMP + vterm doesn't cover such as unexpected disconnects, there's dtach and detached.el.

GNU Screen, tmux and dtach (with convenient Emacs interface) all serve to limit that problem.

> What's an opinion you have that most people don't agree with?

> Haha. I specialize in having opinions people don’t agree with :) In kitty, the most controversial is probably that terminal multiplexers are the devils’ gift to mankind.

I cannot agree strongly enough that the virtualized rendering done by programs like screen & tmux is a curse. Trying to get truecolor tmux+ssh+tmux+vim working in truecolor mode is a disaster. Terminal-multiplexers emulate a screen and then render their buffered session to whomever is attached, and it's a frustrating, bad, lossy process. Often the original session and what attaches don't match, and there's not much one can really do. I am not a terminal expert but the situation seems awful, & is one of the highest elder crafts of computing, far more subtle & deranged than one could ever imagine.

Kitty tries to re-build a lot of these terminal multiplexer functionalities itself. It has tabs, it has splits. Generally kitty is a pretty do-all terminal system. Afaik there's not really any way presently to solve the root of these mismatch problems, which is basically that programs generally don't reevaluate their TERM environment variable, even though these environs are technically editable at runtime (by the process, or outsiders).

Kovid (Kitty author) talks about being a vim user. I too am a vim user. In fact, one of my favorite techniques has been to just live inside vim, to use it's terminal emulator, to get ok (i'm still pretty not good) at using it's splits and windows to lay stuff out. The one missing agent for me was that I wanted a way to be able to detach my vim session & come back latter. I spent considerable time trying reptyr & other ways to reattach processes. After much failure at getting vim to detach/reattach, to persist across sessions, I eventually re-encountered a program dtach[1] I'd run into years ago, which works great. Unlike tmux and screen, it's not a terminal emulator. It's just a dumb pipe that a program can render into, and a way to reattach to that pipe again latter. It can run in detached mode so that if your session exits, the program stays open. This way, I can just open vim & have my entire workspace inside vim, with whatever terminals I need, and detach/reattach the vim session at my leisure.

[1] https://github.com/crigler/dtach

So now whenever you execute that command, it will update the channel with the current price. You can then run it on a loop, crontab, whatever you want. One of my favorite things to do is to use while $true loops, and applications like dtach.

i prefer to use dtach for that if I only need this feature

If you really want crazy, run `xterm -ti 340`, then run run an X server from the xserver-sixel repository <https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-SIXEL> in it. Now y ou can run as many terminal emulators, complete with real truetype fonts and all the colors you could want, inside the one terminal. Use a tiling window manager and you’ll be able to avoid using tmux entirely.

There's a X with sixel support: https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-sixel

I played with this before, and I could use X11 within a mlterm terminal.

I should try to recompile it with cosmopolitan to have a single X server binary both for Windows and Linux

What you do is run `xterm -ti vt340`. If your xterm was compiled with SIXEL support, this will enable it. (You can test it by running something simple like `gnuplot -e "set terminal sixelgd; set key bmargin center horizontal; plot [-5pi:5pi] [-5:5] real(tan(x)/atan(x)), 1/x"`.)

Now run Xsixel (from <https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-sixel>) to run an X server that outputs to sixel graphics. In that X server you can run any program you would like, and its graphical output will be converted to sixels, printed to stdout, given to xterm, and then xterm will draw them.

Job done!

See <https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/> for more information and tools, along with lots of screenshots.

There's a version of X for these terminals: https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-sixel

You could probably do something like run X on Sixel for terminals that support Sixel.

> unfortunately it's way too slow to get anywhere near 'realtime' output (30fps or better).

That's not due to sixels. Check out the sixel nyan cat: https://github.com/hackerb9/sixvid

Look at the FPS indicator in the bottom. It was pointed to me in https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal/issues/448#issuecommen...

The issue may be in your code.

I think I have similar performance issues, as the glyph selection process could be more optimized.

Derasterized is mostly Jart work (who is best known here for her work on Cosmopolitan), we were mostly interested in quality.

Reducing the set of glyph to something that could benefit from optimizations could help.

> I really wish there was a decent pixel-framebuffer standard for terminals (with at least the same performance as ncurses)

Sixel performance is quite decent: personally, I can play videos in my terminal.

Try MPV on mintty: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/2183

I have also played with a X server rendering over sixel, no performance issue: https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-SIXEL

When sixel support is added to Windows Terminal, I may update it, because it would be fun to have one tab to run stuff!