> SIXEL is one of image formats for printer and terminal imaging introduced by Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC). Its data scheme is represented as a terminal-friendly escape sequence. So if you want to view a SIXEL image file, all you have to do is "cat" it to your terminal
I wonder if a terminal protocol invented in the mid 80s to send graphics to dot-matrix printers is still a good idea four decades later.
How well does it deal with > 8 bit colours and very high resolutions?
Most terminals don’t support > 8 bit, so this is less about having a cutting-edge graphics protocol in the terminal, but more about having a standardized, backwards-compatible protocol that can feasibly be implemented by most terminal emulators.
Why would you look at that! The best terminal emulator (xterm) has this feature :)
Looks like iTerm2 supports this already. Where can I read more about the format and the use cases?
I’m already thinking of terminal based graphical RPG game…
There are libraries in most languages to output sixel graphics, however libsixel (https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/) is a popular one written in C. There are some interesting use-cases shown on that page. These will abstract away the escape sequences and allow you to pass them a raw bitmap.