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When I was young I learned how to use UNIX by telnetting into sdf.lonestar.org and in my mind the flexibility of the shell caused me to imagine UNIX in my head
by jart 5y ago
When I was young I learned how to use UNIX by telnetting into sdf.lonestar.org and in my mind the flexibility of the shell caused me to imagine UNIX in my head as this powerful thing that made Windows 9x and Mac 9x feel like toys by comparison.
So when my school offered UNIX classes I gleefully signed up and they sat me down in front of this. When I saw the CDE Solaris desktop for the first time I thought "what is this? this can't possibly be UNIX, it looks something that was built by people who punched in their time cards and were forced to follow orders to build something that looks like Windows 3.1.
A superior operating system deserves a superior graphical user interface. I thought Enlightenment circa 1998 was a much better look for UNIX: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2bcmol/enlightenment_desktop_for_linux_circa_1998/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/2bcmol/enlighten... since it felt more true to its hacker base. It's a shame the old enlightenment desktop is no longer maintained, and CDE is. But thankfully, I think Steve Jobs corrected this error for us all with OS X. I felt just as thrilled when I first saw that, as I did when I first saw Enlightenment.
- pram 5y agoEnlightenments main problem was using the libraries was an exercise in masochism: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
- jart 5y agoImagine if Enlightenment was released with Qt's developer API and GNOME's license. We'd be living in a different world today. Shame we couldn't complete the triforce back then.
- jancsika 5y agoThere was a neat terminal emulator he wrote that had some prefixed commands for viewing images and videos right in the window. Also, the rant linked above has some responses from the Enlightenment author on page 5 of the comments. Getting some popcorn... :)
- jart 5y agoThat's old fashioned internet drama right there. It's cool he added images and video to terminals. That's something about terminals people have been trying to change for a long time and no one's figured out how to do it yet in a way that can gain consensus. I personally find the block character workaround more exciting since it's portable, requires a small amount of algorithmic / mathematical hackery, and produces a nice retro aesthetic.
- jancsika 5y agoNot sure I understand this workaround. Can it achieve pixel-exact output? Say I want to leverage it to get inline visual output in the terminal from imagemagick. Am I getting pixel-exact output? Or am I merely imagining pixel-exact output roughly the size of the retro-styled block?
- jart 5y agoIt's pixel-exact if you use unicode half blocks but pixel-exactness is meaningless if you scale the image or video to fit it in the display. You can gain higher resolution using the unicode block elements since it effectively grants four quasi pixels with two colors, in which case you can use some kind of nearest neighbor search to figure out which combination most closely approximates the 2x2 pixel chunk of the image. Where the math gets turned up to 11 is if you limit yourself to a 256 or 8 color palette and you want to use the shade blocks to blend colors like the dos days since that's difficult to accurately model. Last time I checked the techniques based on the cielab δe or din99d are the current state of the art. Some terminals like gnome-terminal avoid it entirely by simply not displaying shade blocks at all, and instead substituting them for solid blocks where the color blending is performed naively in software.
- jancsika 5y agoLet's just assume the image fits into the terminal window without scaling. In this case are any of the techniques you describe perceptually indistinguishable from displaying the image by normal means (e.g., displaying an image that fits without scaling in my browser window)?