Hacker News Reader

Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to do something like this, but writing the actual GIF to the host's framebuffer (/dev/fb*)? Or are we getting into X11 territory?

View on HN

If you use a Mac, the Iterm2 terminal emulator has an additional protocol that supports rendering images [0]. It basically encodes the image with terminal escape sequences, and also works for animated gifs.

Unfortunately, it seems to not be a standard - it would be neat if there were such a standard, and if other terminals could/would do similarly. It seems like the silliest thing but I like being able to easily indicate when my tests fail or not:

    alias SUCCESS="echo -e '\n\nSUCCESS' \
        && imgcat ~/Pictures/success-100.png \
        || imgcat ~/Pictures/fail-100.png"

    make test && SUCCESS

0: https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-images.html

See https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html for a much more comprehensive terminal graphics protocol

Slick :D Thanks for pointing that out!

It's not standard, but there are other terms with their own custom escape codes such as Terminology (from Enlightenment DE) and Kitty (not to be confused with KiTTY, the fork of PuTTY).

There is also the sixel escape sequences will render using 6 pixel character blocks and is supported in xterm with the vt250 (iirc) support enabled.

For what it's worth, xterm also supports vector graphics if you enable the right kind of VT mode. But that's a whole other discussion :)

Or we could try using sixel...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

It's entirely possible to write a GIF to the framebuffer (setting aside that the framebuffer is deprecated in favor of KMS+DRM) without implicating X11.

Is it (or DRM) safe over an SSH connection?

You can't use DRM or the framebuffer over SSH, you can't open device files or do ioctls remotely like that.

I see. So I guess it's not really possible to do something like the OP with mixed text/graphics, sadly, you have to either stick to text or get an X11 terminal.

    $ mpv --vo=drm *.gif

Reply on news.ycombinator.com