Show HN: Sixel-tmux displays graphics even if your terminal has no Sixel support

It's titled as a rant, in a file called RANTS.md, and unless you've gone out of the way to read it, the rest of the immediately available documentation looks to be perfectly professional and courteous. I'm not sure what you are expecting?

I dislike when this sort of stuff is front-and-center on a project but it seems perfectly reasonable to accept that a developer might have opinions and feelings that caused them to "scratch an itch". People who aren't annoyed with existing systems don't in general try to replace or work around them, and there's certainly a load of projects I've found with disagreeable approaches to contributions or governance that I would rather not put my own time into. I imagine they feel the same, and appreciate that they documented that frustration.

>Try to use sixel to play videos in mintty, with 24 bit support so palettes aren't a problem.

You are confusing sixel with the iTerm image protocol which is different. Sixel is a really old and outdated, inefficient protocol that only supports uncompressed 6-bit paletted images. It would be best if we could just stop talking about sixel altogether, because this is not even what you're referring to anymore. I'm actually concerned that you're conflating these two, it would also best if you could be clear about this in terms of your project so it's not confusing as to what your project supports. Maybe the name should change from sixel-tmux at some point?

SSH compression is not going to be better than the image's native compression, you really don't want to rely on that to compress your images when we already have dozens of other better ways to transmit video.

>Not on mintty. I can change the font size up and down, it even resizes the sixels in proportion so the images remain aligned to the text in a pixel-perfect way.

I'd love to look into how that's accomplished but I can't use mintty because I use a Mac, sorry. I'm also not really interested in trying to mess with mingw just to get this set up.

This isn't FUD either, you're saying the terminals are bad, well, there is no terminal I can use that works correctly, I suggested to help out fixing the terminals if you know how and you basically said no. So what am I supposed to do? Part of making a good protocol is making one that is easy for the apps and terminal emulators to implement correctly, if that doesn't exist, then like I said you have to go back to square one. Adding this support to tmux is useful in some cases, but it still isn't going to help with getting the terminals to implement this right.

>In the future, sixel-tmux will intercept sixels live and rewrite them into other format, like iTerm or kitty.

This is a good idea, please do this instead of trying to get other terminals to adopt Sixel when they are just going to have to replace it down the line anyway.

No I'm not.

> Sixel is a really old and outdated protocol that only supports 6-bit paletted images.

No it doesn't.

sixels can be 16 million colors, that's precisely what the snake.six outputs tests: if you can't see the precise degradation of the snake skin greens and yellows, your terminal is broken.

With so many bad terminals, it's no wonder that a lot of people have such a bad opinion about sixels!

> It would be best if we could just stop talking about sixel altogether, because this is not even what you're referring to anymore. I'm actually concerned that you're conflating these two

Actually, with what you said, I think you're the confused one here. When you could not express in your own words which practical limitations were imposed by sixels, I was 99% sure.

Now I'm 100% sure you have no idea of what you are talking about. Sorry if it's blunt, but take the time to run the tests I've suggested to correct your misconceptions about sixels.

Maybe you'll end up loving the format once you see what it's really capable of?

> I'd love to look into how that's accomplished but I can't use mintty because I use a Mac, sorry. I'm also not really interested in trying to mess with mingw just to get this set up.

Intel macs can run Windows natively. You've also got your pick of emulators, from parallels to vmware, if you roll that way.

So install Windows one way or another, go to msys2.org, download the latest release, click on install. No messing required, mintty is here by default.

You can then use pacman if you want more, which BTW is far better than most of the package managers available on Mac: simply follow the pacman update steps clearly explained with many screenshots on the first page.

Then you'll have an up-to-date msys2 install, with most of the linux tools you want running natively (no WSL involved) or just a `pacman -S` away.

>> In the future, sixel-tmux will intercept sixels live and rewrite them into other format, like iTerm or kitty.

> This is a good idea, please do this instead of trying to get other terminals to adopt Sixel when they are just going to have to replace it down the line anyway.

What you've written makes about as much sense as saying a drawing program should stop trying to support BMP format since it will have to be replaced down the line by JPG or PNG.

gimp, paint and others support many formats. Nobody is complaining. People just click on open. They don't care about the underlying formats.

It's due to a cygwin and how /dev/cons* are different from /dev/pty* cf https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/2020-May/244878.html

I've tried to explain that a bit better in server-client.c (check line 251) to give the user a clue of what's happening with *cause = xstrdup(c->ttyname)

Unfortunately, even in 2021, properly configuring a terminal can be complicated.

That's why sixel-tmux page has a step-by-step configuration guide, and why I often provide config files in other projects like https://github.com/csdvrx/indent-rainbow : if needed, check https://github.com/csdvrx/indent-rainbow/blob/main/config/wi... even if I need to update it that should give you a good base to start tweaking from.

I strongly encourage you to check your configuration with the steps suggest on the sixel-tmux page, or at least the minimal set of steps shown in http://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-testsuite (which I should update to show how font change should work, with sixels being resize to be kept in perfect alignment with the text, as done in mintty, as several people seem to believe it's a sixel limitation)