5 ms·

There are definitely lots of interesting uses once this reaches critical mass. A "high definition" progress bar, showing photos of course, thumbnails when doin

by ape4 3y ago

There are definitely lots of interesting uses once this reaches critical mass. A "high definition" progress bar, showing photos of course, thumbnails when doing an `ls`, graphical web browsing, plotting charts, nicer looking gtop, things we haven't even dreamed of.

prmoustache 3y ago
If it had to reach critical mass, it would have done so ages ago. This is 45y old tech.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  When this tech was invented it was less relevant than it is now. For the following reasons: - It required special expensive terminals, the VT330 (mono) or VT340. Those were not ubiquitous, the VT320 was the bread and butter type. Later VTx20 models also didn't gain support for it (usually the lower range models got premium features from the previous ranges like multiple connections / pages but this one didn't 'trickle down'). So there wasn't so much incentive for developers to support it as the installed base was very low. - It required a long time to send all the information, because terminals were still on slow serial connections. The VT320 could only do up to 19200 bps which was not even super fast for text at 80x25! Sixel images would take ages to transfer. Even though we had different expectations of response speeds then, sixels were slow by the standard of the day. - Colour highlighting (or even monochrome "bold"/ultrabright) was not even common in most commandline tools back then, even LS. Hell, on HP-UX in the 90s I couldn't even use the cursor keys in the default shell for command history and line editing! Mod cons we take for granted now were yet to be invented then. - Thumbnail processing as the parent suggests would take a lot of space and processing speed. My quota at college was a few megabytes. In fact I hardly had any images. I think I had just one, a nice Enterprise-D render that I used as wallpaper. It's not like we had thousands of images to sift through like we do today. Of course the web changed that rapidly but at that time text terminals were already on the way out. Some apps used it for stuff that was worth the wait. Like the print preview in word perfect. But many apps didn't bother because the above constraints just made them infeasible. Sixels only really took off after their original terminals were long gone. And really in this day and age we should be able to come up with something better.
  - kragen 3y ago
    sixel was more relevant then than it is now because a vt340 was still cheaper than a pc with a vga in it and the cpu time to decompress even a gif with lzw required a quite noticeable wait; jpeg wasn't even in the picture now, if you want to display graphics from a remote server, your choices include webp over quic, jpeg over http, and h.264 over ssh, and raw pixels over x11, possibly lz77-compressed by forwarding over ssh -XC sixel is an obviously terrible choice compared to any of those except that it forms part of your shell window, which is a pretty big plus; but i agree with you that in this day and age we should be able to come up with something better
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      I don't think a VT340 and a PC competed in the same category back then. A VT needed a serious minicomputer at the very least at a backend - PC-based Linux wasn't an option yet. It was just something dependent on a core choice of what kind of computing you wanted in your business (centralised minicomputer or distributed with PCs) The applications those ran were also not compatible at all.
      - kragen 3y ago
        a pc running procomm plus made a pretty good terminal, and there were better emulators of the vt family than procomm if you needed that and then you could also use the pc for some other things, like it could edit a text file more responsively, and without causing context switches on your vax and slowing it down for other users. even if moving the files back and forth over kermit was a bit of a pain, and the keybindings for tpu or edt weren't compatible with wordstar or brief or whatever you used on the pc but yeah once you had pcs there was a strong temptation to move most of the computing onto them unless it wouldn't fit, even though prodos, ms-dos, system 7, etc., were diarrhea pie
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      But do we need to do everything in your shell window? I made an alias to be able to show pictures from my kitty terminal...and almost never use it. I have a photo viewer on my laptop, why would I use the terminal for that? If I want to show a single picture, it doesn't take longer to type eog <filename> [1] than my alias (icat), if I need to see thumbnails of more than one, it doesn't take longer to open my file manager. If the file is remote, the directory is mounted easily from my file manager or the command line. [1] eye of gnome in my case
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
You can already make detailed bars with Unicode block drawing.

by ape4 3y ago

prmoustache 3y ago

If it had to reach critical mass, it would have done so ages ago. This is 45y old tech.

wkat4242 3y ago
When this tech was invented it was less relevant than it is now. For the following reasons: - It required special expensive terminals, the VT330 (mono) or VT340. Those were not ubiquitous, the VT320 was the bread and butter type. Later VTx20 models also didn't gain support for it (usually the lower range models got premium features from the previous ranges like multiple connections / pages but this one didn't 'trickle down'). So there wasn't so much incentive for developers to support it as the installed base was very low. - It required a long time to send all the information, because terminals were still on slow serial connections. The VT320 could only do up to 19200 bps which was not even super fast for text at 80x25! Sixel images would take ages to transfer. Even though we had different expectations of response speeds then, sixels were slow by the standard of the day. - Colour highlighting (or even monochrome "bold"/ultrabright) was not even common in most commandline tools back then, even LS. Hell, on HP-UX in the 90s I couldn't even use the cursor keys in the default shell for command history and line editing! Mod cons we take for granted now were yet to be invented then. - Thumbnail processing as the parent suggests would take a lot of space and processing speed. My quota at college was a few megabytes. In fact I hardly had any images. I think I had just one, a nice Enterprise-D render that I used as wallpaper. It's not like we had thousands of images to sift through like we do today. Of course the web changed that rapidly but at that time text terminals were already on the way out. Some apps used it for stuff that was worth the wait. Like the print preview in word perfect. But many apps didn't bother because the above constraints just made them infeasible. Sixels only really took off after their original terminals were long gone. And really in this day and age we should be able to come up with something better.
- kragen 3y ago
  sixel was more relevant then than it is now because a vt340 was still cheaper than a pc with a vga in it and the cpu time to decompress even a gif with lzw required a quite noticeable wait; jpeg wasn't even in the picture now, if you want to display graphics from a remote server, your choices include webp over quic, jpeg over http, and h.264 over ssh, and raw pixels over x11, possibly lz77-compressed by forwarding over ssh -XC sixel is an obviously terrible choice compared to any of those except that it forms part of your shell window, which is a pretty big plus; but i agree with you that in this day and age we should be able to come up with something better
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    I don't think a VT340 and a PC competed in the same category back then. A VT needed a serious minicomputer at the very least at a backend - PC-based Linux wasn't an option yet. It was just something dependent on a core choice of what kind of computing you wanted in your business (centralised minicomputer or distributed with PCs) The applications those ran were also not compatible at all.
    - kragen 3y ago
      a pc running procomm plus made a pretty good terminal, and there were better emulators of the vt family than procomm if you needed that and then you could also use the pc for some other things, like it could edit a text file more responsively, and without causing context switches on your vax and slowing it down for other users. even if moving the files back and forth over kermit was a bit of a pain, and the keybindings for tpu or edt weren't compatible with wordstar or brief or whatever you used on the pc but yeah once you had pcs there was a strong temptation to move most of the computing onto them unless it wouldn't fit, even though prodos, ms-dos, system 7, etc., were diarrhea pie
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    But do we need to do everything in your shell window? I made an alias to be able to show pictures from my kitty terminal...and almost never use it. I have a photo viewer on my laptop, why would I use the terminal for that? If I want to show a single picture, it doesn't take longer to type eog <filename> [1] than my alias (icat), if I need to see thumbnails of more than one, it doesn't take longer to open my file manager. If the file is remote, the directory is mounted easily from my file manager or the command line. [1] eye of gnome in my case

kevin_thibedeau 3y ago

You can already make detailed bars with Unicode block drawing.