xserver-SIXEL VS notcurses

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!

> The only reason we don't have animation frameworks for the terminal is because it's not possible

https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses

Notcurses. Install it and run notcurses-demo to be suitably impressed.

Same for me, I would be much more motivated if there was something like textual for Rust. Given the capability of terminal emulators now I think Rust is lacking behind in the TUI field. Just checkout what can be done with something like notcurses

On the application side of rendering, see notcurses, it is at the leading edge: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

Other TUI libraries of note: https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/doc/OT...

The broader world probably knows him best for the terminal handling library Notcurses[1] and a lot of telling terminal emulator authors to get their shit together.

I’ve had his grad-school project libtorque[2] (HotPar ’10), an event-handling and scheduling library, on my to-read list for years, but I can’t seem to figure out how it accomplishes the interesting things it does.

[1] https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Notcurses, https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/

[2] https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Libtorque

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...

And there's also the notcurses library: