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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

>iTerm2 extends the xterm protocol with a set of proprietary escape sequences.

I wonder if any other terminal uses the same escape sequences. If not, why not?

It’s worse than that, there’s other shells that support their own ANSI escape sequence for transferring base64 encoded images: kitty (not to be confused with KiTTY - the PuTTY fork) and Terminology (of enlightenment DE) each have their own “standard” and they differ from iTerm2’s. They all have their own CLI tools too.

Then there is sixel - which solved a problem back when TTYs were VDUs but aren’t really suitable for a modern era where it’s all terminal emulators running on (U)HD displays. I don’t think sixel support is all that widespread though but happy to be corrected there.

What we really need is one CLI tool to rule them all. One tool that will detect the shell you’re using and default to the best escape sequence for that shell; falling back to ASCII art when all else fails.

This is something I’ve been actively working on in some of my spare time but it’s not ready for public consumption, yet....

Pedantry: Those are terminal emulators, not shells.

Yeah I did say “terminal emulators” else where in that comment. Not really sure why I said “shells” in the first line. Must have been having a senior moment....

Sidenote: terminology does not transfer base64 images, but gives an URL (usually a local file, but it could work with http), so that does not work over ssh; but it's faster (no copy/encode/decode).

hterm, the terminal emulator portion of the Chrome (OS) Secure Shell app, supports them.

(Aside: I dislike the vagueness of the term "proprietary." I rarely hear anyone call the non-ANSI VT-100 or xterm sequences "proprietary," even though they got started in exactly the same way as iTerm2's.)

> I dislike the vagueness of the term "proprietary."

iTerm2 calls their escape codes proprietary[0]. As far as I can tell, they are not trying to create a standard. VT320, on the other hand, is an ANSI standard[1].

[0] https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-escape-codes.html

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT320

Some day they'll be standards and I'll change the documentation to say "perfectly normal" instead of "proprietary" :)

It's probably a matter of writing a proper RFC like document.

That is how standards should be made.

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