5 ms·

How is this proprietary standard designed for dot matrix printers a better choice than using standards-based image formats with their associated rich ecosystem

• altairprime 4y ago
  Was this reply intended for a comment? The documentation page linked doesn’t make any claims about or comparisons to other solutions, to the best that I can determine, and so it’s unclear to me what statement this is in reply to.
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    > Was this reply intended for a comment? No, I'm just asking why there's interest around Sixel when there are protocols (like iTerm's Inline Images Protocol) that use standards-based image formats. I'm not a heavy terminal user and don't see much value for images in my CLI, so one very possible explanation is that I don't understand the use cases where this "interesting" format (without a guaranteed pixel aspect ratio, as I understand it) shines.
• kps 4y ago
  Technically it may not be, but xterm has supported it approximately forever, and xterm is the de-facto standard minimum terminal emulator.
  • CharlesW 4y ago
    That's very helpful to know, thanks! So Sixels are a reasonably-popular de facto standard already, which I did not understand.
    • kps 4y ago
      They date to DEC terminals of the early '80s. DEC was involved in developing X Windows (competing with other windows systems like Sun's NeWS) and xterm supports many of the DEC terminal extensions to ANSI X3.64.
      • kragen 4y ago
        early 90s, and i don't think xterm's sixel support is nearly that old
        • kps 4y ago
          I thought the VT240 had sixels as well as ReGIS, but now I'll have to look it up. Edit: (a) The VT240 (1984) did do sixels (§4.18.1 of VT240 Series Programmer Reference Manual). (b) xterm didn't add it until 2013. Maybe I was thinking of dxterm? Now I have to look that up. Edit 2: I was almost certainly thinking of dxterm. I can't find a specific reference for the Ultrix version (which I had used) but the VMS version (which I didn't) had sixel support circa 1990.
          • kragen 4y ago
            aha, thanks for the correction; i thought it was vt320 and up only was that for images tho or just softfonts
            • kps 4y ago
              Both. It's barely mentioned, though, and clear that they intended people to use ReGIS instead, presumably due to bitmaps not being very useful at 19.2K.
              • kragen 4y ago
                just wait until the sixel hipsters find out about naplps and ripscrip
                • 4y ago
• flohofwoe 4y ago
  Sixels is supported by more than one terminal implementation, while the example you posted only works in iTerm2 (and IIRC only accepts a filename as input, but doesn't offer a way to send image data directly as a stream of characters through stdout). I would welcome a proper pixel graphics / framebuffer standard for terminals though.
  • kps 4y ago
    I know that at least Konsole, mlterm (which I use), and wezterm support iTerm's method. Unfortunately iTerm's method does not have a googlable name like ‘sixel’.
• vidarh 4y ago
  Because unlike the alternatives, Sixel has relatively widespread support, and that matters far more.