sixel-gnuplot VS libsixel

A few years ago, you had to recompile it to add sixel support on debian, so I provided https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot

Now it's included by default IIRC

sixel-tmux works literally anywhere you can use tmux: as long you can display unicodes on your terminal, the sixels will be "captured" by sixel-tmux and converted into something you can see. Sixels are in-band, so ssh isn't a problem.

In a way, using sixel-tmux is like "giving magical goggles" to your terminal, to let it render sixels so you can see something (even if it isn't perfect), in the hope you'll be tempted to use a better terminal that will show you sixels in all their glory, with a pixel perfect quality.

Sixels enable all kind of cool things, like gnuplot right in your terminal (cf https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot ): sometimes I even watch youtube on my terminal lol

sixel-tmux was made as a first step towards turning derasterize into a more general library: my plan was to add it to nnn but I got bored along the way and moved to other stuff. I might still do that I I love nnn as a filemanager.

BTW, even if there have been quite a few interesting work by @hpa and others in the last 2 years, I think derasterize still has textmode supremacy. derasterize is a collab with @jart after I started adding features to her previous solutions which was based on half blocks like this solution; she's also made further work based on this like https://justine.lol/printimage.html and https://justine.lol/printvideo.html

That's also my main usecase: doing plots with gnuplot

A few years ago, it wasn't compiled by default in the debian packages so I released binaries: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot

I wish framebuffer consoles would support sixels to do without X or wayland, mostly to have inline plots line https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot without having to use say fbi

> On the other hand, text output to the console has generally gotten slower, usually much slower than you would expect for the change in console size

I don't see why we should tolerate slow rendering of text. The techniques recently used to accelerate text rendering in Windows Terminal should be usable in the framebuffer console.

and sixel support can be made to work with this: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot

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