CHcharlesdaniels·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
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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