HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
hackerb9
lsix
Shell2018–2026
hackerb9 / lsix

lsix

Like "ls", but for images. Shows thumbnails in terminal using sixel graphics.

Command LineCreative & Media
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
9Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
4.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Like "ls", but for images. Shows thumbnails in terminal using sixel graphics.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 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 year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-12-26 23:41:17 UTC to 2026-03-02 22:04:53 UTC.

012342018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

12 sources
metadat·Jun 6, 2024
Awesome idea, but doesn't work under PuTTY/KiTTY: $ lsix Error: Your terminal does not report having sixel graphics support. Please use a sixel capable terminal, such as xterm -ti vt340, or ask your terminal manufacturer to add sixel support. You may test your terminal by viewing a single image, like so: convert foo.jpg -geometry 800x480 sixel:- If your terminal actually does support sixel, please file a bug report at http://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/issues Please mention device attribute codes: ^[[?6c Too bad! That would be pretty spiffy. Is there an open-source windows terminal which supports Sixel? Mostly seems only Cygwin or WSL stuff out there, nothing pure?
In lsix: Like "ls", but for images
mananaysiempre·May 14, 2023
What the hell, ouch. This looks to be very buggy across the board. Here’s a test: LF='\n'; ESC='\e'; CSI=$ESC'['; DCS=$ESC'P'; ST=$ESC'\\' CUF=$CSI'%dC' # cursor forward SIXEL=$DCS'q%s'$ST # sixel image printf "before $SIXEL$CUF after$LF" \ '#0;2;0;0;0#1;2;100;100;0#2;2;0;100;0#1~~@@vv@@~~@@~~$#2??}}GG}}??}}??-#1!14@' \ 2 With a freshly launched terminal on my machine, I get: - in XTerm (xterm -xrm "XTerm*decTerminalID: vt340"), "before ", "HI", " after", that is to say exactly what you want, out of the box; - in Foot, "before ", "HI", newline, some spaces, "after"; - in Contour, "before ", "HI", enough newlines to clear the screen (?..), no spaces (?!..), "after". OK, sez I, let’s just save the cursor position (DECSC, ESC 7) before the image and restore it (DECRC, ESC 8) afterwards, then skip over it; that is, DECSC
Read the rest
=$ESC'7'; DECRC=$ESC'8' # add to definitions printf "before $DECSC$SIXEL$DECRC$CUF after$LF" # change format string In XTerm, this (rightly) makes no difference. In Foot and Contour however, you still end up a line resp. a screen below where you started, if now with the correct horizontal position. So it seems to me like what you want should work by default, except it doesn’t. It should be possible to instead just treat the whole thing as a framebuffer overlay (by computing or directly asking for the character cell size, as Kirill Panov rightly admonishes me is possible with XTWINOPS) without touching the cursor; that’s what the “sixel scrolling” setting (DECSDM) is supposed to do. Then you can just manually move the cursor forward however many positions after you’re done drawing. Except apparently the DEC manual (the VT330/340 one above) and DEC hardware contradict each other as to which setting of DECSDM (set or reset) corresponds to which scrolling state (enabled or disabled), and XTerm has implemented it according to the manual not the VT3xx[1,2,3]—then most other emulators followed suit[4]—then XTerm switched to following the hardware[5,6] (unless you and that’s what I’m seeing on my machine right now. So now you need to check if you’re on XTerm ≥ 369 or not[7]. And also for other terminals’ versions, because apparently that’s a thing now[8,9]. Again, ouch. P.S. DEC had an internal doc for how their terminals should operate (DEC STD 070) [10]. It does not document DECSDM at all. [1] https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/217#issuecomment-86449... [2] https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/issues/41 [3] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1782 [4] https://github.com/arakiken/mlterm/pull/23 [5] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_369 [6] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h3-T... [7] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/commit/0918fa251e2... (the correct version cutoff is 369 not 359, the patch contains a now-fixed bug) [8] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/2204 [9] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/src/li... (look for mentions of invertsixel or invert80) [10] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/standards/EL-SM070-00_DEC_S...
In Are We Sixel Yet
charlesdaniels·Oct 13, 2021
I would point out that sixels[0] exist. There is a nice library, libsixel[1] for working with it, which includes bindings into many languages. If the author of sixel-tmux[2][3] is to be believed[4], the relative lack of adoption is a result of unwillingness on the part of maintainers of some popular open source terminal libraries to implement sixel support. I can't comment on that directly, but I will say, it's pretty damn cool to see GnuPlot generating output right into one's terminal. lsix[5] is also pretty handy as well. But yeah, I agree, I'm not a fan of all the work that has gone into "terminal graphics" that are based on unicode. It's a dead-end, as was clear to DEC even back in '87 (and that's setting aside that the VT220[6] had it's own drawing capabilities, though they were more limited). Maybe sixel isn't the best possible way
Read the rest
of handling this, but it does have the benefit of 34 years of backwards-compatibility, and with the right software, you can already use it _now_. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel 1 - https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ 2 - https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux 3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756701 4 - https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/blob/main/RANTS.md 5 - https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix 6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220
In Using ASCII waveforms to test real-time audio code
charlesdaniels·Jun 6, 2020
Every time I see these things, I wish Sixel graphics[0] were better supported, or else some more modern alternative. Being able to use GNUPlot with Sixel output or tools like lsix[1] is really cool! I think if support / libraries / knowledge about Sixels was more widespread, we would see some really nifty terminal applications cropping up. 0 - https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ 1 - https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix
In Unicode-based scientific plotting for working in the terminal
csdvrx·Dec 5, 2019
Work in progress, but sixel support may be coming to mainline tmux: git clone git://github.com/tmux/tmux git switch sixel git checkout b1904c9b8db514133d3372aac13b2ff0b2093cc3 This will give you the "placeholder" box for sixels in terminals that do not support sixel (but you should use mlterm on Linux or mintty on Windows) The upcoming feature is to replace this placeholder box by unicode art for the sixels, cf https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1613 for the current discussion. Then you will be able to break your dependency on the GUI just by using w3m and your favorites sites, whether your terminal supports sixel or not (but it should, it's just better!) apt-get install libsixel1-bin w3m -sixel -o display_image=1 google.com Cf https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/244930/how-do-i-vi... There are other apps with integrated sixel supp
Read the rest
ort like mikkuter for twitter, gnuplot (there was https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-gnuplot , but now the sixel backend is compiled by default in the official gnuplot-nox starting from debian-10) At the moment, I'm working on a mutt hack rendering outlook emails with all their included thingies (images etc) into sixels. If someone is looking for an idea, it'd be great to have a IRC client that replaces URL containing pictures by their sixels renditions, a bit like what lsix does ( https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix )
In Command Line Tools to Break Your Dependence on the GUI
csdvrx·Mar 30, 2019
cat /etc/debian_version shows the file cat /etc/debian_version /etc/debian_version shows the file twice Shockingly, cat sixel1.six sixel2.six sixel3.six or img2sixel file1.jpg file2.jpg file3.jpg works in the exact same way: cf https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-testsuite/blob/master/3-sixe... Simply screenshot and edit the result when you are done. But if you want to create another tool, for example to trim white boarders and concatenate, by all means please do! Follow the example of https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix who wrote a great tool!
In Show HN: GNUplot with sixel – Mix images, ANSI colors and plots
etatoby·Mar 29, 2019
Using Braille patterns is a pretty cool idea. But you're still using 3×8/2×4=3 bits per pixel, excluding colour information and SSH compression. If you used the various extensions that are present in most terminal emulators (Sixel, and other proprietary/fringe ones) you could get at least 8/6=1.333 bits per pixel (for Sixel) if not better, depending on whatever the terminals support. The results look good, here is an example of a project using Sixel: https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/ There is even vector graphics support in Xterm and other terminal emulators (Tektronix mode, and maybe others such as ReGIS) that allows you to plot a line from point A to point B (and other shapes for ReGIS) In Tektronix mode you can plot lines with perfect resolution (4096 over the width of the terminal) using only 5 bytes per line, no matter how long the l
Read the rest
ine is across the screen. These gifs are XTerm windows in Tektronix mode: http://phk.freebsd.dk/AducLoran/animation.gif - http://phk.freebsd.dk/AducLoran/animation2.gif You can even use gnuplot (over ssh if you need to) in an XTerm and have the plots shown in a separate window, using Tektronix mode emulation. I think this mode would be better suited to some of your program's outputs.
In ROSshow: ASCII art visualizations for robot sensor data

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.