> there's clearly a bigger reason than just being able to do stuff without the slow desktop environment. but what is it? For me, it’s visualisation of data on

> there's clearly a bigger reason than just being able to do stuff without the slow desktop environment. but what is it? For me, it’s visualisation of data on a remote HPC cluster. Shuffling data back and forth is dangerous because then everything is duplicated and you never know where the latest version is. SSH tunnels and remote X sessions are finicky and in several contexts blocked intentionally or not. Sixels are perfect: the plots are accurate enough to actually see what’s going on, nothing is moved around, and it works with a wobbly VPN server over some dodgy wifi (or 3G).