Chafa 1.8: Terminal graphics with a side of everything | Hacker News Reader

Chafa 1.8: Terminal graphics with a side of everything

hpjansson.org

137 pointspabs323 comments

Chafa is an open source project that lets you visualize images on the command-line by converting them to Unicode characters ("ASCII art") with colours. It's available in many Linux distros, as well as Homebrew for macOS. What a find!

  $ chafa example_image.jpg

https://hpjansson.org/chafa/

Interesting.

Under the list of supported terminals they mention:

Another innovative beast of genetically engineered goodness: ctx.

[1] https://ctx.graphics/terminal/

To play, or not to play?

Interesting project. In an ideal universe something like this would make the "Web" a.k.a. HTML/CSS/JS completely obsolete.

That’s very cool… do too ctx as a daily driver?

Chafa is awesome. Chafa+Kitty is... mega-awesome! ( You thought I was gonna say Chitty ;p )

Chitty Chitty Hash Bang?

Wow this is pretty incredible.

I work on image processing and generally do mosh + tmux + cli tools. I have to run servers on my workstation to view images (or use jupyter notebooks). This would seriously simplify some basic debugging workflows for me!

If you can use iTerm2, you can use the commands ‘imgcat’ and ‘imgls’ to view images in the terminal.

Interesting, it doesn't work with my mosh setup but it looks really good over ssh. I'll fiddle with my setup and give it a try. Thanks!

If you just need to see images in your terminal, xterm has (in some versions) supported sixels for years.

xterm -ti 340 (not under openbsd). Then:

chafa -f sixels image.png

I use iTerm2 connected to debian over mosh

Here’s to the renaissance in terminal UIs.

I really wish there was a standard pixel format for terminals that was better than sixel. iTerm2 and kitty each have their own custom mechanism, but AFAIK, they are the only ones that use their respective protocols.

Wezterm supports both their protocols :)

`notcurses-demo` works badly in `wezterm`. `mapscii.me` works fine. Nice terminal, but a bit hard to configure, because of Lua.

I hadn't heard of wezterm before. It looks pretty interesting. How mature is it compared to alacritty?

It's much better in every way.

It's very actively maintained by someone who cares a lot about features and user experience. In fact I've switched to wezterm right after a current Alacritty maintainer rejected my little pull request that excluded fancy newline signs and stuff from the default URL characters list.

Aside from cool features, the renderer is better too, IIUC it's already using lots-of-quads like a proposed alacritty improvement in a long unmerged PR.

https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/

https://github.com/wez/wezterm

Anyone know how/if Alacritty is supported? Doesn't seem to work for me.

This is amazing! Even works with GIF89a (but not with APNG).

Unfortunately, "chafa" means lame in Spanish.

still no hdr? oh please! kidding. wow the kitty terminal is awesome. i do kind of want hdr. maybe throw in some bloom too?

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