[HN Gopher] Uberzug: A CLI utility for drawing images on terminals
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2020-12-26 23:00 UTC)