Re: [dev] [announce] ff2sixel: view farbfeld images in terminal

From: Alexander Krotov <ilabdsf_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2017 03:01:41 +0300

On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 10:10:07AM +0100, hiro wrote:
> why would one want to view images in st, can't your shell start other
> graphical programs for that? is st becoming a new kind of web browser
> now? and why don't you open remote images using a remote file system
> instead of fucking around with remote shells and then trying to
> display them in a local terminal?!
>
> i mean even loonix can do this already. sshfs, qiv (or other proper
> graphical application of your choice). you even have a window manager
> in your same old project here, why not open some windows already?

Being able to display graphics does not make terminal a web browser,
it makes it a graphical terminal, just like drawterm.

SSHFS is different. If I use remote file system I still have to
switch to local image viewer and point it to image. It then pulls
an image over separate connection, decodes it and displays in another
window. And each time I switch working directory in remote shell
I have to do the same in local shell or image viewer.

In my case I have a remote system with lots of data that I want to
explore interactively without copying it to my local machine. While
I can display numerical figures in my terminal, I can't display
plots. It is a limitation of terminal that I worked around with
sixels.

I agree that sixels is just a hack not to be included into st. It
is not supported by any graphical programs anyway and does not make
two-way interaction possible. If I wanted full-blown solution I
would probably use remote framebuffer, but I don't want to setup a
VNC server on each machine just to display some plots.
Received on Tue Mar 21 2017 - 01:01:41 CET