lsix VS fzf

In XTerm, this (rightly) makes no difference. In Foot and Contour however, you still end up a line resp. a screen below where you started, if now with the correct horizontal position.

So it seems to me like what you want should work by default, except it doesn’t.

It should be possible to instead just treat the whole thing as a graphical overlay (by computing or directly asking for the character cell size, as Kirill Panov rightly admonishes me is possible with XTWINOPS) without touching the cursor; that’s what the “sixel scrolling” setting (DECSDM) is supposed to do. Then you can just manually move the cursor forward however many positions after you’re done drawing.

Except apparently the DEC manual (the VT330/340 one above) and DEC hardware contradict each other as to which setting of DECSDM (set or reset) corresponds to which scrolling state (enabled or disabled), and XTerm has implemented it according to the manual not the VT3xx[1,2,3]—then most other emulators followed suit[4]—then XTerm switched to following the hardware[5,6] (unless you and that’s what I’m seeing on my machine right now. So now you need to check if you’re on XTerm ≥ 369 or not[7]. If I’m reading the Notcurses code right, other terminals have followed suit[8].

Again, ouch.

P.S. It seems DEC had an internal doc for how their terminals should operate (DEC STD 070) [9]. It does not document DECSDM at all.

[1] https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/217#issuecomment-86449...

[2] https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/issues/41

[3] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1782

[4] https://github.com/arakiken/mlterm/pull/23

[5] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_369

[6] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h3-T...

[7] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/commit/0918fa251e2... (the correct version cutoff is 369 not 359, the patch contains a now-fixed bug)

[8] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/src/li... (look for mentions of invertsixel)

[9] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/standards/EL-SM070-00_DEC_S...

Sixel - Sixel is a standard from the 1970's/1980's DEC VT series. It has enjoyed a tremendous resurgence in popularity thanks largely to saitoha's libsixel project. Many projects are now using sixel; a few you may have heard of include lsix, chafa, and notcurses.

I would point out that sixels[0] exist. There is a nice library, libsixel[1] for working with it, which includes bindings into many languages. If the author of sixel-tmux[2][3] is to be believed[4], the relative lack of adoption is a result of unwillingness on the part of maintainers of some popular open source terminal libraries to implement sixel support.

I can't comment on that directly, but I will say, it's pretty damn cool to see GnuPlot generating output right into one's terminal. lsix[5] is also pretty handy as well.

But yeah, I agree, I'm not a fan of all the work that has gone into "terminal graphics" that are based on unicode. It's a dead-end, as was clear to DEC even back in '87 (and that's setting aside that the VT220[6] had it's own drawing capabilities, though they were more limited). Maybe sixel isn't the best possible way of handling this, but it does have the benefit of 34 years of backwards-compatibility, and with the right software, you can already use it _now_.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

1 - https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/

2 - https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux

3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756701

4 - https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/blob/main/RANTS.md

5 - https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix

6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220

no, I found it and it's called lsix

In addition, I think bash's `operate-and-get-next` can be very helpful. When you go back through your shell history, you can hit Ctrl+o instead of enter and it will execute the command then put the next one in your history on the command line, and keep track of where you are in your history. This way, you can rerun a bunch of commands by going to the first one and Ctrl+o till you are done. And you can edit those commands and hit Ctrl+o and still go to the next previously run command.

Note: fzf's history search feature breaks this. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/issues/2399

fzf : https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Those are the most used aliases in my gitconfig.

"git fza" shows a list of modified/new files in an fzf window, and you can select each file with tab plus arrow keys. When you hit enter, those files are fed into "git add". Needs fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

"git gone" removes local branches that don't exist on the remote.

"git root" prints out the root of the repo. You can alias it to "cd $(git root)", and zip back to the repo root from a deep directory structure. This one is less useful now for me since I started using zoxide to jump around. https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide

> my history is so noisy I had to find another way

The fzf search syntax can help, if you become familiar with it. It is also supported in atuin [2].

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#search-syntax

[2]: https://docs.atuin.sh/configuration/config/#fuzzy-search-syn...

You call it with `n` and get an interactive fuzzy search for your directories. If you do `n ` instead, it’ll start the find with `` already filled in (and if there’s only one match, jump to it directly). The `ls` is optional but I find that I like having the contents visible as soon as I change a directory.

I’m also including iCloud Drive but excluding the Library directory as that is too noisy. I have a separate `nl` function which searches just inside `~/Library` for when I need it, as well as other specialised `n` functions that search inside specific places that I need a lot.

¹ https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

² https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

View on GitHub

I do find the history pager stuff interesting, but ultimately not of tremendous use for me. I rebound all my history search stuff to use fzf[1] (via a fish plugin for such[2]), and so haven't been aware of the issues

[1] https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

[2] https://github.com/PatrickF1/fzf.fish

You can also use fzf with ripgrep to great effect:

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/blob/master/ADVANCED.md#usin...