lsix VS sixel-tmux

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

It's not really that strange that tmux doesn't support sixels. It's quite a bit more complicated and resource-intensive than ANSI Escape Codes or ncurses.

It might be fine for local[1] multiplexing but over the network it is not as fast as even something like VNC or RDP.

[1] https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/

After having spent too much time trying to get the simple https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/ features into mainline tmux (last November https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/3753), maybe it'd be easier to jump ship as use zellij?

Could anyone offer recommendations on "riced" zellij configuations, or just a demo where it shows doing with (say charts of disk usage per folder), watching a movie with mpv + keeping a vim to type on?

Your approach looks very sound!

A fork of terminfo may be needed if the description of modern terminal capabilities can't be added -- or if old and deprecated attributes repurposed for that job (like in your padding example): if you're automating the correction/creation of terminfos in ~/, IMHO, it may be better to piggyback on tic as much as possible.

Anyway, to backport modern terminal descriptions to legacy programs, creating correct binary terminfos in ~/.terminfo seems the best practice. You can also invent new TERM. When I wanted to have italics etc about everywhere, personally that's just what I did for sixel-tmux: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/?tab=readme-ov-file#ste... : just declare a new $TERM you know to be right, and use that in the apps that let you use a little logic in their configuration file

I do that in my .vimrc:

   " If Vim doesn't know the escape codes to switch to italic

You can have that functionality integrated within tmux with https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/ : if you terminal doesn't support sixels, you'll at least see something close to the picture they represent.

Then of course it's not pixel-perfect unless you make your terminal very large (like 800x240 instead of 80x24) but something being better than nothing, I'd argue it's for the better if all you can do is 80x24 with no pictures otherwise.

sixel-tmux can help you have both: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/

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

> Some terminal emulators have support for images, which fit most of the use cases here but not the one I described.

That what sixel-tmux is for, when you're in a hurry and needs images with your current terminal emulator: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux

Maybe tmux-sixel does that tmux sixel

If you want some crazy shit like sixels or italics and ligatures, try msys2 that's what I've used for the screenshot. The only thing comparable on Linux in term of features is xterm and, that's another story.