GIgiulianopz·Aug 30, 2024Submission
Sixel Sabotage in VTE (Gnome Terminal)
2 points · Open discussioncsdvrx
sixel-tmux
C2019–2024
csdvrx / sixel-tmux
sixel-tmux
sixel-tmux is a fork of tmux, with just one goal: having the most reliable support of graphics
8Distinct people
29Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
514GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
sixel-tmux is a fork of tmux, with just one goal: having the most reliable support of graphics
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
> The thing about sixel is it's only supported on old DEC glass terminals, xterm with a non-default configuration, mintty, and several emulators that are fairly unlikely to be…
csdvrx used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- csdvrx/derasterize · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:59:22 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year29 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-11-27 01:33:17 UTC to 2024-08-30 07:20:41 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesIt's not really that strange that tmux doesn't support sixels. It's quite a bit more complicated and resource-intensive than ANSI Escape Codes or ncurses.
It might be fine for local[1] multiplexing but over the network it is not as fast as even something like VNC or RDP.
[1] https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/
In Show HN: a Rust based CLI tool 'imgcatr' for displaying imagesAfter having spent too much time trying to get the simple https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/ features into mainline tmux (last November https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/3753), maybe it'd be easier to jump ship as use zellij?
Could anyone offer recommendations on "riced" zellij configuations, or just a demo where it shows doing with (say charts of disk usage per folder), watching a movie with mpv + keeping a vim to type on?
In Zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries includedAgreed - COLORTERM has its own problem. I prefer your approach, it looks very sound!
A fork of terminfo may be needed if the description of modern terminal capabilities can't be added -- or if old and deprecated attributes repurposed for that job (like in your padding example): if you're automating the correction/creation of terminfos in ~/, IMHO, it may be better to piggyback on tic as much as possible.
Anyway, to backport modern terminal descriptions to legacy programs, creating correct binary terminfos in ~/.terminfo seems the best practice. You can also invent new TERM. When I wanted to have italics etc about everywhere, personally that's just what I did for sixel-tmux: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/?tab=readme-ov-file#ste... : just declare a new $TERM you know to be right, and use that in the apps that let you use a little lo
Read the rest
gic in their configuration file
I do that in my .vimrc:
" If Vim doesn't know the escape codes to switch to italic
let &t_ZH="\e[3m"
let &t_ZR="\e[23m"
" Italics pseudo-auto toggle: force italics if we recognize it's supported from TERM
if match($TERM, "xterm-256color-italic")==0
highlight Comment cterm=italic
endif
BTW you should package your emacs config file with the emacs APE from https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/emacs to do a cuteemacs, to carry your config files and everything in a portable binary: https://github.com/csdvrx/CuteVim
Another idea: have you considered that the "program that would be run by .bashrc" to generate the "unambiguous 24-bit color capabilities" could set environment variables to communicate them? Like, if you can't stuff them in terminfo, stuff them in environment variables! Env var work well on Windows, and the configuration files of terminal programs could just use these when available to override.
It's be like adding friends to your proposed TERMVERSION: TERMSETF24 etc where you've have a finer control than COLORTERM