ttyplot VS libsixel

Compare ttyplot vs libsixel and see what are their differences.

libsixel

A SIXEL encoder/decoder implementation derived from kmiya's sixel (https://github.com/saitoha/sixel). (by saitoha)
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ttyplot libsixel
7 23
940 2,383
- -
9.0 0.0
5 days ago 8 months ago
C C
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ttyplot

Posts with mentions or reviews of ttyplot. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-12.

libsixel

Posts with mentions or reviews of libsixel. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-07.
  • GNU/Hurd strikes back: How to use the legendary OS in a (somewhat) practical way
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Aug 2023
  • VT330/VT340 Sixel Graphics
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 May 2023
    Library you can use to generate these images:

    https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

    Plenty of links to other projects.

  • UnicodePlots
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2023
  • Forking Chrome to Render in a Terminal
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jan 2023
    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;
  • A command line tool that draw plots on the terminal
    25 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jan 2023
    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.

  • Emacs on an iPad
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Nov 2022
    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.
  • Libsixel
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jul 2022
  • What color do you use for your terminal?
    1 project | /r/sysadmin | 23 Jun 2022
    You don't have multi-colored terminal output? Even legacy systems have long had Sixel support.
  • Are We Sixel Yet?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2022
    > 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

  • Saw a few console apps and thought I might pitch in/show my own graphics library for the C# Console: The BasicRender Suite
    7 projects | /r/csharp | 3 Mar 2022

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ttyplot and libsixel you can also consider the following projects:

feedgnuplot - Tool to plot realtime and stored data from the commandline, using gnuplot.

sixvid - Simple script for animated GIF viewing using sixels

vnlog - Process labelled tabular ASCII data using normal UNIX tools

mpv - 🎥 Command line video player

SqueezeMeta - A complete pipeline for metagenomic analysis

chafa - 📺🗿 Terminal graphics for the 21st century.

matplotlib-backend-kitty - show matplotlib plots directly in your kitty terminal

xterm-addon-image - Image addon for xterm.js

euporie - Jupyter notebooks in the terminal

urxvt-perls - Perl extensions for the rxvt-unicode terminal emulator

smag - Show Me A Graph - Command Line Graphing

urxvt-perls - Perl extensions for the rxvt-unicode terminal emulator