Are we SIXEL yet? | Hacker News Reader

Are we SIXEL yet?

arewesixelyet.com

31 pointssmasher16419 comments

I haven't really tried sixel yet but I run wezterm as a daily driver and it is very convenient to be able to view images in the command line. e.g ls the directory and then run img foo.jpg on the images in the directory without needing to switch windows.

What can Sixel do for me? Any interesting examples?

It can display images in your terminal. This is made pretty clear by the first paragraph on the page and also by the Wikipedia article it links to[0]; I'm wondering what else you're asking for.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

Interesting use cases. Can TUIs benefit? Any prominent examples?

Yazi, If, and Ranger file managers use it to display images inline. Euporie allows you to run a graphical Jupyter console session.

Sixel is a very old standard and has been used to display graphics in terminals since the 80s. It fell out of favor when high-resolution bitmapped desktop environments became mainstream (and affordable), but it is still useful if you are doing remote console work and don't want to set up network hoops with ad hoc HTTP servers just to view a remote diagram.

Feels to me like it violates the only real assumption for a terminal.

Which is?

Everything is text.

People have been drawing ASCII art since ASCII was invented, and control codes like the bell "character" existed even before computers did.

Which is still linear text all tools work with.

What's your definition of "text"?

(I define it as "written words in a human-readable language". You must have something else in mind, because neither ASCII art nor control codes fit my definition.)

A linear stream of non-null characters, the majority of content being printable glyphs.

What is a null character? That’s like saying “non-zero chance”.

Tell that to something as fundamental as ASCII 0x07!

Is it really worth the effort? What's the use case?

Indeed. The world has moved on to the Kitty graphics protocol.

I'm not sure I see the use case for that, either. What do people use this for?

No, it definitely did not

displaying images in PuTTY is of vital importance to the survival of humanity, obviously

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