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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we need terminal escape codes to temporarily switch to linked alternative fonts. ;)

There are already several escape sequences for doing just this. In fact the original way of drawing terminal graphics was using a 7bit escape sequence to switch to a terminal graphics font.

Personally I’d rather see in-lined vector graphics become better supported. This was available on some of the Techtonix (iirc) hardware VTs and as far as I know, the only widespread terminal emulator to support that particular mode is xterm.

Isn't that more like switching to a different character set, with supporting fonts having to be already present? Or what are you referring to?

I was thinking along the lines of online (or inline) fonts, similar to web fonts in CSS, which would allow for arbitrary custom glyphs.

Sixel graphics on the vt220 (1983) worked by defining a custom font of 10x10 px characters (9x10 in high-resolution mode), which you could then switch to for any given character.

As far as I know, there is no terminal emulator that supports this flavor if sixel graphics.

Congratulations on reinventing sixels. :)

Sixel is different. It’s a way of drawing graphics rather than switching to alternative character sets.

Sixels could be used here too, but native support for vector graphics would be nicer.

I’m also of the opinion that sixel sucks as a modern option. It’s got a low DPI resolution, cannot be compressed, and is its own bespoke specification which means lots of additional work for terminal maintainers. Which is why most terms these days go with their own escape sequences for natively supporting common formats like PNG and JPEG.

In my own terminal emulator, I’ve got support for several image formats but I doubt I’ll ever bother with sixel.

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