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Comment by mfeldheim | Hacker News Reader

What’s the point? Why would I want images in my console?

Displaying the result of a command as a graph (histograms, plots) can be more pleasant than a bunch of **** bars. An external graphic window works well too, but displaying in place can be convenient sometimes, no need to click or alt-tab.

Running MRI processing on a super computer and I want to check at a certain point in the pipeline that things went correctly by viewing a couple of slices without downloading a huge brain image

This is good example why: https://nitter.it/thingskatedid/status/1316074032379248640#m

Jupyterfying the console

Eg, Euporie - https://euporie.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

> If you’re working with Jupyter notebooks in a terminal only environment, like an SSH server or a container, or just prefer working in the terminal, then euporie is the tool for you!

Uses Kitty ("Currently only the kitty and WezTerm terminals support this"), Sixels, or ansi art.

Also supports SVG, HTML, LaTeX, and Markdown.

Show images inline and have it scroll with other text. This is useful for working with programs that process images. For example, ImageMagick can render a PNG in the terminal like this:

   convert image.png six:-

"six" means use Sixel format, and "-" tells it to write to stdout.

Demo (running on cygwin's mintty): https://twitter.com/uguu_org/status/1631207051602042880

This NES emulator uses Sixels for rendering games over TCP :) https://github.com/henrikpersson/potatis

Checking snapshot diffs from git repo. I would love doing that in terminal instead of opening in external app.

I have scripts that do diffing and opens results in external app, but I will replace this with in-terminal images when I will find out a way to do that.

I find it a lot faster to do icat previews than bother opening up an application to find & view a specific image. Even something as lightweight as feh, is still gonna open a split in my window manager which in going to be more jarring than a preview in the terminal.

It would allow portable graphics applications on the terminal, e.g. this C64-emulator-in-Docker only renders ASCII characters, but could be extended with sixels to render graphics (I actually tinkered with this, but didn't get far because most terminals have either none or too slow sixels support):

https://github.com/floooh/docker-c64

Cat photos in /etc/motd

I was installing a fresh copy of Windows 10 this week and Cortana told me that once I connected to a Wifi network I'd be able to get on with browsing cat photos o_O

Microsoft has jokes.

I have literally patched OpenSSH to show me cat pictures instead of the usual randomart.

how many cat pictures do you have for this to work?

As many as necessary and then some. No such thing as too few cat pictures!

I use AI to generate the pictures when natural supply is scarce. Cache them locally, address by host key hash. Use the hash as seed for bonus points.

Mathematical plots, seeing the result of AI generated images, seeing the result of image compression algorithms, ...

Having these intermixed between the regular scrollable textual output is quite powerful.

Plotting data, mathematical notation.

So you can browse Twitter timeline with icons on kernel console on NetBSD/m68k

    $ mpv -vo=sixel ~/Downloads/pirated-hollywood-blockbuster.mkv

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