That’s interesting. Do you think sixels could work for the baseline tests? Would it be feasible to have them display nicely in an IDE, like VS Code or Visual Studio?
I’m not aware of text editors supporting sixels, which could make preparing the tests a challenge. Certainly, you could imagine a text editor supporting them, but I’m not aware of one that does personally.
I will concede that for your specific use case, an off the shelf ASCII plotting library probably involves less custom tooling.
Sixels will work: they are fast enough to allow youtube video playback !!!
https://github.com/saitoha/FFmpeg-SIXEL/blob/sixel/README.md
The problem is NOT THE FORMAT, the problem is the lack of tooling: links and w3m are among the rare text browsers that can display images in the console.
It's just a matter of the browser sending the image to the terminal in some format it can understand, but if that hasn't be thought about as a possibility (say, for text reflow issues) it's going to be far more complicated than just adding a new format, as you will have to work both on say the text reflow issues (ex: how do you select the size of the placeholder, when expressed in characters?), on top of the picture display issues.
Said differently, it would be easier to have console IDE that supported graphics if any format whatsoever (sixel, kitty...) was supported by a console IDE; we could then argue about the ideal format.
Arguing about the ideal format BEFORE letting the ecosystem grow using whatever solution there is only results in a negative loop.
It's like if a startup was arguing about the ideal technological stack even before trying to find a product market fit!!
Personally, I do not care much about sixels, kitty or iterm format - all I want is to see some kind of support for a format that's popular enough for tools using it to emerge.
Yes, it would be better if that supported format was the option that had the greatest chance of succeeding, but right now, that is a very remote concern: first we need tools, then if in the worst case they are for a "bad" format, we can write transcoders to whatever format people prefer!
Right now, there is rarely any "input" to transcode (how many console tools support say iTerm format?), so we have a much bigger bootstrapping problem.
> an off the shelf ASCII plotting library probably involves less custom tooling
With a terminal like msys2 or xterm, no custom tooling is required: just use the regular gnuplot after doing the export for the desired resolution, font, and font size.
gnuplot is far more standard than plotting library that often require special Unicode fonts on top of requiring you to use their specific format.