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I recently found out that XTerm supports sixels natively if started with the "-ti 340" option. For example gnuplot can make use of that feature using the comman

by sprash 6y ago

I recently found out that XTerm supports sixels natively if started with the "-ti 340" option. For example gnuplot can make use of that feature using the command "set terminal sixlegd". It turns out because of the way sixels are encoded (six vertical pixels in a row using bitplanes) it packs better than png when used in conjunction with the bzip2 packer. Every image can simply be encoded to sixel with imagemagick using "convert image.png sixel:- > image.six" Personally I think sixels are genius should be used much more often.

petepete 6y ago
GNUPlot and XTerm also support Tektronix, there's lots of info in this older discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776904
mongol 6y ago
The Kitty terminal author also published a "terminal graphics protocol". I don't know what other terminal supports it, however. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html
dTal 6y ago
>it packs better than png when used in conjunction with the bzip2 packer. Cute! But is it fair? I don't think it's lossless - the color depth is much reduced.
- sprash 6y ago
  I took the reduced color depth into consideration. However on second glance it seems like Imagemagick does not compress PNG very efficiently with default settings. After recompressing with zopflipng PNG was easily able to beat bzip2 packed sixels. Results for 256 color 512x512 Lenna: Sixel + bzip2: 245K PNG Imagemagick: 467K PNG Zopfli 10 Iterations: 188K
brutt 6y ago
Sixels will be added to libvte (gnome-terminal): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/254 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/254
- iso-8859-1 6y ago
  Great news! I think we may finally see a resurgence. It will be well supported on mainstream Linux, and given that the web is getting so heavy-weight, this will offer a solid alternative for graphics that you can rely on. Libvte is very popular.
leephillips 6y ago
That should be "sixelgd", of course. And there is the classic "dumb" terminal, that plots to any text terminal, optionally using ansi escape codes for color.
iso-8859-1 6y ago
I used your ImageMagick command, but the resulting image is very bright and almost invisible. I tried disabling Unicode using +u8, but that didn't work. I tried mlterm, that worked.
- sprash 6y ago
  I forgot to tell that you have to enable 256 colors as well. Put this into your .Xresources: XTerm.*.decTerminalID: vt340 XTerm.*.numColorRegisters: 256 And refresh with xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xresources It should work now.

by sprash 6y ago

petepete 6y ago

GNUPlot and XTerm also support Tektronix, there's lots of info in this older discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776904

mongol 6y ago

The Kitty terminal author also published a "terminal graphics protocol". I don't know what other terminal supports it, however. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/graphics-protocol.html

dTal 6y ago

>it packs better than png when used in conjunction with the bzip2 packer. Cute! But is it fair? I don't think it's lossless - the color depth is much reduced.

sprash 6y ago
I took the reduced color depth into consideration. However on second glance it seems like Imagemagick does not compress PNG very efficiently with default settings. After recompressing with zopflipng PNG was easily able to beat bzip2 packed sixels. Results for 256 color 512x512 Lenna: Sixel + bzip2: 245K PNG Imagemagick: 467K PNG Zopfli 10 Iterations: 188K

brutt 6y ago

Sixels will be added to libvte (gnome-terminal): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/254 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/254

iso-8859-1 6y ago
Great news! I think we may finally see a resurgence. It will be well supported on mainstream Linux, and given that the web is getting so heavy-weight, this will offer a solid alternative for graphics that you can rely on. Libvte is very popular.

leephillips 6y ago

That should be "sixelgd", of course. And there is the classic "dumb" terminal, that plots to any text terminal, optionally using ansi escape codes for color.

iso-8859-1 6y ago

I used your ImageMagick command, but the resulting image is very bright and almost invisible. I tried disabling Unicode using +u8, but that didn't work. I tried mlterm, that worked.

sprash 6y ago
I forgot to tell that you have to enable 256 colors as well. Put this into your .Xresources: XTerm.*.decTerminalID: vt340 XTerm.*.numColorRegisters: 256 And refresh with xrdb -merge $HOME/.Xresources It should work now.