[HN Gopher] Uberzug: A CLI utility for drawing images on terminals ___________________________________________________________________ Uberzug: A CLI utility for drawing images on terminals Author : ducktective Score : 19 points Date : 2020-12-25 12:36 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | ivanbakel wrote: | What I was surprised to learn when trying to set one of these up | to use over SSH[0] - this image rendering is not "in the | terminal" (in retrospect, it perhaps obviously can't be). These | tools draw directly onto the X11 canvas, which for me begs the | question - what are they for? If you want a real GUI that badly, | why not use one that's not in the terminal? | | Ncurses-style CLIs have the benefit of being usable over bad | connections and on headless boxes. I can't see why you would want | to display an image in your terminal if you're already running a | graphical session, and presumably have an image viewer installed. | | [0]: turns out there are programs which turn images into blocks | of coloured characters, and therefore _do_ work over SSH. | unphased wrote: | I think once you've been "living" in your terminal for a while | you're pretty used to the keyboard-centric life and going to a | separate mouse-centric window manager world can be considered | to be cumbersome. | | That said, I do agree with you. I also think any image viewing | functionality needs to have a practical way to get that image | sent through the same channel as that terminal connection | itself so that if you're on it remotely it will still work... | Emptysister wrote: | every now and then, I am using kitty terms "icat" kitten: | | https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/icat.html | cpach wrote: | No screenshots? (^_^) | contingencies wrote: | https://github.com/seebye/fmui#screenshots | jitl wrote: | A more practical and cohesive alternative is Sixel | [https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/], which is an in-band, | escape based image format supported by "modern" terminal | emulators, like iTerm2, which also has a proprietary image format | [https://iterm2.com/documentation-images.html] | | I prefer in-band images because it doesn't require complex | coordination between the process that wants to display the image | and other software like X11, instead the process just writes out | the appropriate bytes to the TTY and they get displayed. | enriquto wrote: | Sixel is really useful, but it is not optimal in terms of color | quantization and fast rendering (it is quite a pain to write a | color sixel image). The world needs a hero that submits | simultaneously a patch to xterm, iterm and all widely used | terminals to accept decent in-band color images--using verbatim | framebuffers with a tiny header. | amelius wrote: | Back in the old days, you could open a graphics screen on most | home computers. E.g. in Applesoft BASIC, you could use HGR and | PLOT commands to draw things. That simplicity is missing on | modern computers. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-12-26 23:00 UTC)