Are We Sixel Yet?

24 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by smasher164

8 Comments

plmpsu

6 hours ago

What can Sixel do for me? Any interesting examples?

matt_kantor

5 hours ago

It can display images in your terminal. This is made pretty clear by the first paragraph on the page and also by the Wikipedia article it links to[0]; I'm wondering what else you're asking for.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

plmpsu

5 hours ago

Interesting use cases. Can TUIs benefit? Any prominent examples?

phoyd

2 hours ago

Yazi, If, and Ranger file managers use it to display images inline. Euporie allows you to run a graphical Jupyter console session.

Sixel is a very old standard and has been used to display graphics in terminals since the 80s. It fell out of favor when high-resolution bitmapped desktop environments became mainstream (and affordable), but it is still useful if you are doing remote console work and don't want to set up network hoops with ad hoc HTTP servers just to view a remote diagram.

eqvinox

4 hours ago

Is it really worth the effort? What's the use case?

bitwize

3 hours ago

Indeed. The world has moved on to the Kitty graphics protocol.

eqvinox

3 hours ago

I'm not sure I see the use case for that, either. What do people use this for?

Tajnymag

3 hours ago

No, it definitely did not