9 ms·

Libsixel: The new standard of SIXEL development – graphics in the terminal

104 points by vmorgulis 11y ago

vmorgulis 11y ago
The real home page: http://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ http://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ Wikipedia on Sixels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
- jaxb 11y ago
  Why not go farther back in time, to BBN BitGraph? :-) There's a DVI previewer and netpbm converter for it, gnuplot supports those as well -- http://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvibit http://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvibit, http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtobbnbg.html http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtobbnbg.html and http://www.gnuplot.info/docs_4.2/node423.html http://www.gnuplot.info/docs_4.2/node423.html
  - vmorgulis 11y ago
    Very cool and even more confidential technology ;-)
kristianp 11y ago
Related old discussion on Rich Command Shells https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436309
striking 11y ago
This is really neat, but isn't it super inefficient? The color quality is pretty poor and I'm fairly certain it can't take advantage of hardware acceleration. It's neat to put graphics on your old DEC terminals, it's cool to have as a hack. But re-implementing it into new tech? I dunno. I'd really like to see an mmap'd YUV or RGB buffer in the terminal being read from a pipe/file/memory area, because I feel like that might be a little more efficient. Or, hell, what if we got a straight up GL context? That could seriously be interesting.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  A GL context sounds cool, although at what point are you just reimplementing a DWM inside xterm?
- nona 11y ago
  Wouldn't wayland be the right thing™ for this kind of stuff? Basically have the terminal become a wayland (sub)compositor, with some commands to set up buffers to write to.
  - qwertyuiop924 11y ago
    No, wayland would be Good and Wrong™. It would be very nice and kind of elegant... And Linux only. Adding support for it upstack (i.e. SDL) was the Bad and Right™ thing to do. And nobody wants another implementation of X.
- vidarh 11y ago
  What I want is outputting an image from a remote server onto my terminal, or ending a pipe with feeding the output from "uniq -c" or something to a script creating an inline graph etc. The page focuses on showing the limits of it, but there are lots of small little cases where being able to output graphics to the terminal in otherwise predominantly textual applications is great, but not great enough to justify a more complicated solution. > being read from a pipe/file/memory area And now you've lost network transparency to gain efficiency that wasn't needed in the first place.
- mhd 11y ago
  With pixel graphics, we're kinda back in blit/Oberon territory and with vector graphics, you'd basically be doing Tektronix 2.0. The latter had some merits because your whole system was a terminal, but I don't quite get what this gets us in a system where you can have as many graphics contexts as you want anyway. Especially if the rest of the window where this graphics is embedded is ancient constrained technology. I'm not a big fan of the Bell school of tech, but I definitely understand Rob Pike's source of pride in testifying that he never wrote a cursor-controlled terminal app...
rcarmo 11y ago
Regretfully, iTerm doesn't support this, and it's bitmap support hasn't made it out of beta yet. (also, I can't run the new betas, probably because they're not properly signed)
bryanrasmussen 11y ago
so, could I use this with my linode?
- dsr_ 11y ago
  Yes, but there are relatively few use cases where it wouldn't be better to run X over NX or VNC or Spice, all of which you should be able to do easily.
wund 11y ago
It's very exciting to see inline plots in terminal but I doubt it will ever get mainstream popularity since it's not supported by most terminals.
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  If you only need to display a simple graph you could try Unicode's Braille characters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776112 That should be supported by more terminals.
xvilka 11y ago
This is partially related - support of RGB colors (True Colors, 24bit colors) in various terminals: https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728 https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728

104 points by vmorgulis 11y ago

The real home page: http://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ http://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ Wikipedia on Sixels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

jaxb 11y ago
Why not go farther back in time, to BBN BitGraph? :-) There's a DVI previewer and netpbm converter for it, gnuplot supports those as well -- http://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvibit http://www.ctan.org/pkg/dvibit, http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtobbnbg.html http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbmtobbnbg.html and http://www.gnuplot.info/docs_4.2/node423.html http://www.gnuplot.info/docs_4.2/node423.html
- vmorgulis 11y ago
  Very cool and even more confidential technology ;-)

kristianp 11y ago

Related old discussion on Rich Command Shells https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436309

striking 11y ago

This is really neat, but isn't it super inefficient? The color quality is pretty poor and I'm fairly certain it can't take advantage of hardware acceleration. It's neat to put graphics on your old DEC terminals, it's cool to have as a hack. But re-implementing it into new tech? I dunno. I'd really like to see an mmap'd YUV or RGB buffer in the terminal being read from a pipe/file/memory area, because I feel like that might be a little more efficient. Or, hell, what if we got a straight up GL context? That could seriously be interesting.

voltagex_ 11y ago
A GL context sounds cool, although at what point are you just reimplementing a DWM inside xterm?
nona 11y ago
Wouldn't wayland be the right thing™ for this kind of stuff? Basically have the terminal become a wayland (sub)compositor, with some commands to set up buffers to write to.
- qwertyuiop924 11y ago
  No, wayland would be Good and Wrong™. It would be very nice and kind of elegant... And Linux only. Adding support for it upstack (i.e. SDL) was the Bad and Right™ thing to do. And nobody wants another implementation of X.
vidarh 11y ago
What I want is outputting an image from a remote server onto my terminal, or ending a pipe with feeding the output from "uniq -c" or something to a script creating an inline graph etc. The page focuses on showing the limits of it, but there are lots of small little cases where being able to output graphics to the terminal in otherwise predominantly textual applications is great, but not great enough to justify a more complicated solution. > being read from a pipe/file/memory area And now you've lost network transparency to gain efficiency that wasn't needed in the first place.
mhd 11y ago
With pixel graphics, we're kinda back in blit/Oberon territory and with vector graphics, you'd basically be doing Tektronix 2.0. The latter had some merits because your whole system was a terminal, but I don't quite get what this gets us in a system where you can have as many graphics contexts as you want anyway. Especially if the rest of the window where this graphics is embedded is ancient constrained technology. I'm not a big fan of the Bell school of tech, but I definitely understand Rob Pike's source of pride in testifying that he never wrote a cursor-controlled terminal app...

rcarmo 11y ago

Regretfully, iTerm doesn't support this, and it's bitmap support hasn't made it out of beta yet. (also, I can't run the new betas, probably because they're not properly signed)

bryanrasmussen 11y ago

so, could I use this with my linode?

dsr_ 11y ago
Yes, but there are relatively few use cases where it wouldn't be better to run X over NX or VNC or Spice, all of which you should be able to do easily.

wund 11y ago

It's very exciting to see inline plots in terminal but I doubt it will ever get mainstream popularity since it's not supported by most terminals.

Kristine1975 11y ago
If you only need to display a simple graph you could try Unicode's Braille characters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776112 That should be supported by more terminals.

xvilka 11y ago

This is partially related - support of RGB colors (True Colors, 24bit colors) in various terminals: https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728 https://gist.github.com/XVilka/8346728