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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

You could get better resolution in some terminals by using sixels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

I think there's some other methods in particular terminals for displaying images, but I don't remember them.

And kitty has icat, which just has image support: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/icat/

I'm really confused about how is it that we're in 2024, Linux is open source from top to bottom, and we're still messing around with rendering images in ASCII.

I really wish there was some interest in doing a modern, graphical console. UTF8, antialiasing, graphics, the works.

I have a feeling that we'd end up regretting it. It would get abused in all the unnecessary ways. Kind of like the magic Docker outputs, with output previews and multiple progress bars that break into a horrible mess the moment they hit a log file, instead of a terminal.

Most new-age terminal emulators do have image support and more are getting support every day, even Windows Terminal is working on it.

However this brings up the philosophical debate of just how close you're becoming to a real window manager or display server in the first place.

X is literally that.

It's not though. You have to fiddle around with ports and servers and environment variables.

But a drawing API is clearly not the way modern graphics works best. What would be really cool is a terminal that supported low latency streaming video. Then you can do proper GUI apps using any rendering system they want and it will properly integrate with ssh.

Xsixel

> You have to fiddle around with ports and servers and environment variables.

Would you kindly clarify? Did you mean Xterm?

I believe they meant X.org, the graphical stack used by most graphical Linux systems.

> modern

um.

I guess the rest applies, but...

Kitty is fine, but there is a big issue with tmux and the dev seems to think it is about tiling and not about using remote machines.[0] Sure, I tile because it is there and I don't have control of the terminal I'll use on the other end, but the main draw is I gotta work on machines I'm connecting to with ssh. I think there's a lot of us still needing tools like this (and mosh) but little support. Looks like people were trying to help the dev but there was communication breakdown. I'm all for making sure things are done right and not just accepting hacky solutions, but there has to end up being a solution.

I'd honestly just love to have a minimal terminal like foot[1], but that's wayland only and wayland support is still very mixed. And who knows when ghostty will come out[2]. But I also need linux + mac support and I think a lot of people do (and no wayland to mac port?). Too many terminals are far too bloated. And boy... do I not need this bullshit[3]

[0] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/391

[1] https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

[2] https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

[3] https://github.com/warpdotdev/Warp/issues/900

You might be interested in https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/multiplexing.html

Thanks. I had actually recently stumbled upon wez and missed this part. I see that I can also build it from source (and from git) which meets a lot of my goals. I'll have to play around with this.

I’m working on exactly that :)

On behalf of the entire console user community, thank you!

TermKit?

You could also probably detect the terminal you're in and use some of their advanced features, like the image protocol in iTerm2[0] or the terminal graphics protocol[1]. 1 also lists alternative programs that do this!

[0]: https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html [1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol/

This is how murex works too https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/config/defaults/p...

Yeah, but this is in rust.

Huh?

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