5 ms·

someone please enlighten me, why can xterm do this cool drawing while the modern gnome-terminal can not, I tested the GPU oriented kitty that can display images

someone please enlighten me, why can xterm do this cool drawing while the modern gnome-terminal can not, I tested the GPU oriented kitty that can display images in terminal, but it could not run gnuplot as xterm. what're missing?

enriquto 4y ago
> what're missing? Nothing. Xterm is awesome! And even if xterm is an older program, it seems to be just as actively developed as gnome-terminal. See the changelogs for each: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/commits/master https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/commits/master The second link points to libvte, which is the terminal engine behind gnome-terminal where the actual terminalling happens. The changes to gnome-terminal itself are mostly translations and uninteresting desktop stuff: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/-/commits/master https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/-/commits/mast...
- synergy20 4y ago
  last time I checked xterm can not do utf8 yet
  - enriquto 4y ago
    It certainly can. Since more than 20 years ago! I remember that in 2003, as a "little kid", I changed my configuration from latin-15 to utf8 and it was already supported. You can read here an explanation of how xterm handled ill-formed utf8 characters in 1999: https://www.invisible-island.net/xterm/bad-utf8/ https://www.invisible-island.net/xterm/bad-utf8/
    - synergy20 4y ago
      yes thanks,utf8 indeed works
db48x 4y ago
XTerm implements an old bitmap protocol invented in the 80s. The author of Kitty rightly points out that it’s inefficient, limited to one color per column of 6 pixels (if you want a second color you can go back to the start of the line and print over). Rather than implement support for the Sixel protocol, the author of Kitty choose to implement something modern. It’s actually rather nice; the program can print out a filename for Kitty to load, or even point to a shared memory buffer. Those are very efficient options, provided your program is running on your local machine. Meanwhile Gnuplot supports a wide variety of “terminals”, many of which are just outputs to files of various types, some of which are GUIs, others of which are for actual terminals, like “dumb” (ordinary printable characters), “tek40” and “xterm” which use a protocol invented for Tektronix terminals, “sixelgd” which uses the sixel protocol from the VT340, half a dozen types of printers, etc. But nobody has added one for the Kitty protocol, so it doesn’t work there. The downsides of inventing something new I suppose; the existing software doesn’t automatically support it, someone has to go around and add that support.
- aumerle 4y ago
  This has existed for years for kitty: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/integrations/#tool-gnuplot https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/integrations/#tool-gnuplot

enriquto 4y ago

> what're missing? Nothing. Xterm is awesome! And even if xterm is an older program, it seems to be just as actively developed as gnome-terminal. See the changelogs for each: https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/commits/master https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/commits/master The second link points to libvte, which is the terminal engine behind gnome-terminal where the actual terminalling happens. The changes to gnome-terminal itself are mostly translations and uninteresting desktop stuff: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/-/commits/master https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/-/commits/mast...

synergy20 4y ago
last time I checked xterm can not do utf8 yet
- enriquto 4y ago
  It certainly can. Since more than 20 years ago! I remember that in 2003, as a "little kid", I changed my configuration from latin-15 to utf8 and it was already supported. You can read here an explanation of how xterm handled ill-formed utf8 characters in 1999: https://www.invisible-island.net/xterm/bad-utf8/ https://www.invisible-island.net/xterm/bad-utf8/
  - synergy20 4y ago
    yes thanks,utf8 indeed works

db48x 4y ago

XTerm implements an old bitmap protocol invented in the 80s. The author of Kitty rightly points out that it’s inefficient, limited to one color per column of 6 pixels (if you want a second color you can go back to the start of the line and print over). Rather than implement support for the Sixel protocol, the author of Kitty choose to implement something modern. It’s actually rather nice; the program can print out a filename for Kitty to load, or even point to a shared memory buffer. Those are very efficient options, provided your program is running on your local machine. Meanwhile Gnuplot supports a wide variety of “terminals”, many of which are just outputs to files of various types, some of which are GUIs, others of which are for actual terminals, like “dumb” (ordinary printable characters), “tek40” and “xterm” which use a protocol invented for Tektronix terminals, “sixelgd” which uses the sixel protocol from the VT340, half a dozen types of printers, etc. But nobody has added one for the Kitty protocol, so it doesn’t work there. The downsides of inventing something new I suppose; the existing software doesn’t automatically support it, someone has to go around and add that support.

aumerle 4y ago
This has existed for years for kitty: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/integrations/#tool-gnuplot https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/integrations/#tool-gnuplot