twin VS xserver-SIXEL

Twin - a Textmode WINdow environment, by Massimiliano Ghilardi https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

There is a twin project that is kind of neat, providing the highest fidelity interface possible (text mode, vnc, X gui) but doesn't have terminal multiplexing built in, or a browser interface.

Is it necessary to be in tmux? twin might be an easier solution: https://github.com/cosmos72/twin https://opensource.com/article/20/1/multiple-consoles-twin

Kind of related, Textmode Window Environment is interesting.

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

A couple screenshots are on the old SourceForge site.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/twin/

Nice! I don't know why, but this reminded me of the port(?) of the MSDOS user interface to UNIX-like systems.

Kind of like TWIN? https://github.com/cosmos72/twin

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/ Seems its still getting some updates.

If you've never used Twin then you don't know what youre missing!

A similar concept is available as TWIN: the Textmode WINdowing environment. This is mentioned at the bottom of the "See Also" list at TFA.

https://github.com/cosmos72/twin/

Screenshots at the (presumably old?) Sourceforge page:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/twin/

If you really want crazy, run `xterm -ti 340`, then run run an X server from the xserver-sixel repository <https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-SIXEL> in it. Now y ou can run as many terminal emulators, complete with real truetype fonts and all the colors you could want, inside the one terminal. Use a tiling window manager and you’ll be able to avoid using tmux entirely.

There's a X with sixel support: https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-sixel

I played with this before, and I could use X11 within a mlterm terminal.

I should try to recompile it with cosmopolitan to have a single X server binary both for Windows and Linux

What you do is run `xterm -ti vt340`. If your xterm was compiled with SIXEL support, this will enable it. (You can test it by running something simple like `gnuplot -e "set terminal sixelgd; set key bmargin center horizontal; plot [-5pi:5pi] [-5:5] real(tan(x)/atan(x)), 1/x"`.)

Now run Xsixel (from <https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-sixel>) to run an X server that outputs to sixel graphics. In that X server you can run any program you would like, and its graphical output will be converted to sixels, printed to stdout, given to xterm, and then xterm will draw them.

Job done!

See <https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/> for more information and tools, along with lots of screenshots.

There's a version of X for these terminals: https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-sixel

You could probably do something like run X on Sixel for terminals that support Sixel.

> unfortunately it's way too slow to get anywhere near 'realtime' output (30fps or better).

That's not due to sixels. Check out the sixel nyan cat: https://github.com/hackerb9/sixvid

Look at the FPS indicator in the bottom. It was pointed to me in https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal/issues/448#issuecommen...

The issue may be in your code.

I think I have similar performance issues, as the glyph selection process could be more optimized.

Derasterized is mostly Jart work (who is best known here for her work on Cosmopolitan), we were mostly interested in quality.

Reducing the set of glyph to something that could benefit from optimizations could help.

> I really wish there was a decent pixel-framebuffer standard for terminals (with at least the same performance as ncurses)

Sixel performance is quite decent: personally, I can play videos in my terminal.

Try MPV on mintty: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/2183

I have also played with a X server rendering over sixel, no performance issue: https://github.com/saitoha/xserver-SIXEL

When sixel support is added to Windows Terminal, I may update it, because it would be fun to have one tab to run stuff!