libsixel VS DomTerm

Library you can use to generate these images:

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

Plenty of links to other projects.

Sixels are pixels and enjoy a wide support due to how old it is.

Kitty protocol is PNG or primitives - which BTW would make it great for a GUI library.

Different tools for different needs, but if you are going for a wide support you want something simple that doesn't have 5 different types you have to separately implement and test:

> d: Direct (the data is transmitted within the escape code itself)

> f: A simple file (regular files only, not named pipes or similar)

> t: A temporary file, the terminal emulator will delete the file after reading the pixel data. For security reasons the terminal emulator should only delete the file if it is in a known temporary directory, such as /tmp, /dev/shm, TMPDIR env var if present and any platform specific temporary directories and the file has the string tty-graphics-protocol in its full file path.

> s: A shared memory object, which on POSIX systems is a POSIX shared memory object and on Windows is a Named shared memory object. The terminal emulator must read the data from the memory object and then unlink and close it on POSIX and just close it on Windows.

> What nonsense, it takes literally 15 lines of code without using anything beyond the standard library to write a client

Conveniently taking a preencoded PNG and assuming away the necessary queries of supported protocol:

> Since a client has no a-priori knowledge of whether it shares a filesystem/shared memory with the terminal emulator, it can send an id with the control data, using the i key (which can be an arbitrary positive integer up to 4294967295, it must not be zero).

> for the kitty graphics protocol. I challenge you to match that for sixel

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel/tree/master/perl

    use Image::LibSIXEL;

Also:

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

contains img2sixel, which lets you dump images to the terminal. It can also do animated GIFs.

Video:

https://github.com/saitoha/FFmpeg-SIXEL

GUI apps:

https://github.com/saitoha/SDL1.2-SIXEL

and more, linked from the libsixel repository.

Not sure of Terminal emulator capabilities on Apple devices, but thanks to https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel , several applications, including emacs very much support image output in terminals.

You don't have multi-colored terminal output? Even legacy systems have long had Sixel support.

> SIXEL is one of image formats for printer and terminal imaging introduced by Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC). Its data scheme is represented as a terminal-friendly escape sequence. So if you want to view a SIXEL image file, all you have to do is "cat" it to your terminal

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

Completion for program P should be written and maintained by the "owner" of program P - and installed with program P. This is of course difficult when there are many different "shells" that each have their own "language" for specifying completions. A multi-shell completion library can help with this problem.

To me it make sense that completion for program P should be handled by program P itself. That way, completions are unlikely to get out of sync with the application, and the completion handler can use the same option parser as the application. A way to do this is to use a special "hidden" switch to request completion.

Specifically the DomTerm terminal emulator (https://domterm.org) handles its own completions. Bash allows you to register a command that handles completions for some other command. The following tells bash that to handle completions for the domterm command it should call domterm with the magic "#complete-for-bash" option followed by the existing line and position.

    complete -o nospace -C 'domterm "#complete-for-bash" "$COMP_LINE" "$COMP_POINT"' domterm

Sixel has the one advantage of being mplemented in xterm and a modest number of other terminals. Otherwise, it's a pretty bad format: Inefficient. Unclear and inconsistently implemented specification. All images have to be a multiple fof 6 pixel rows, which may not align with either image height or character height.

Some terminal implement some other protocols, but attempts to specify a standard have failed. There are some tricky issues, such as: When does an image or part of an image get erased? Can you write text on top of an image and if so how are they aligned? What happens if you write an image on top of existing text? On top of an existing image? How does scrolling affect things? What happens to the image on window resize or zoom? Can you reliably update part of an image?

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) supports images in two ways:

If interested in enhanced terminals, please take a look at DomTerm (https://domterm.org). It too optionally uses Tauri/Wry, though it can also also Electron, Qt, or a plain web-browser. You can embed images and rich text among other feayrures. DomTerm also has builtin tmux-like panes+tabs (mouse-draggable), detachable sessions, and a powerful "view" (selection) mode.

bash-preexec.sh and shell-integration.bash are copied from another terminal called DomTerm (that also offers click to position cursor) into ~/.local/share/DomTerm. Those files can be found here.

For people using or considering Mosh or Eternal Terminal: I'd love if you could try DomTerm (https://domterm.org). Specifically DomTerm's support for stable remote connections - see https://domterm.org/Remoting-over-ssh.html .

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) isn't quite what you asked for: It only indirectly has a JavaScript console: Since its frontend is a browser engine, you can open up a JavaScript debugger.

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) attempts to provide similar possibilities as TermKit. However, it starts with the position that it should also (and perhaps first) be a fully-functional modern mostly-xterm-compatible terminal emulator. On top of that we add rich html text, images, logical structure, "shell integrayion", and more.

DomTerm - JavaScript, Electron, Qt - Web browser, Linux (+ others?)

DomTerm (https://domterm.org) uses the Golden Layout library (https://github.com/golden-layout/golden-layout). As far as I can tell, this does everything mentioned in the article. It also supports tabs, and you can also reposition terminal windows by dragging, neither of which I saw mentioned in the article. (I'm currently working on being able to drag between top-level windows. It sort-of-works, but only at the proof-of-concept level.)

Please try DomTerm (https://domterm.org). The 2.9.4 AppImage (https://github.com/PerBothner/DomTerm/releases/tag/2.9.4) should have the needed support for grapheme clusters and hopefully work on reasonably up-to-date Linux systems. Of course there are more recent fixes and improvements if you don't mind building from source.