someone please enlighten me, why can xterm do this cool drawing while the modern gnome-terminal can not, I tested the GPU oriented kitty that can display images in terminal, but it could not run gnuplot as xterm. what're missing?
Meanwhile Gnuplot supports a wide variety of “terminals”, many of which are just outputs to files of various types, some of which are GUIs, others of which are for actual terminals, like “dumb” (ordinary printable characters), “tek40” and “xterm” which use a protocol invented for Tektronix terminals, “sixelgd” which uses the sixel protocol from the VT340, half a dozen types of printers, etc.
But nobody has added one for the Kitty protocol, so it doesn’t work there. The downsides of inventing something new I suppose; the existing software doesn’t automatically support it, someone has to go around and add that support.
Nothing. Xterm is awesome!
And even if xterm is an older program, it seems to be just as actively developed as gnome-terminal. See the changelogs for each:
https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/commits/master
The second link points to libvte, which is the terminal engine behind gnome-terminal where the actual terminalling happens. The changes to gnome-terminal itself are mostly translations and uninteresting desktop stuff:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/-/commits/mast...
You can read here an explanation of how xterm handled ill-formed utf8 characters in 1999: https://www.invisible-island.net/xterm/bad-utf8/