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Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

ratty-term.org

161–170 of 262 posts

Re: Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

#161
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I much prefer seeing tokens used for silly fun stuff, rather than sad get-rich-quick attempts like filling YouTube and Spotify with LLM crap.

Filling GitHub with LLM crap isn't on your list... I wonder why

Happy to include it, plenty of wannabe moneymakers making things worse for the rest there too.

Re: Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

#163
post #35

UNIX still trying to catch up with Xerox workstations in the REPL experience, or general Lisp machines for that matter. Inline graphics from 1981, https://youtu.be/o4-YnLpLgtk?t=376

That's not 3d

It is when you use a CRT instead of a flat panel.

Re: Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

#165
post #93
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that with Sixels, no Rust needed, no 3D crap, no ad-hoc addons, just old vt340 support in XTerm. That's how I read images under a remote pubnix with tut using a Mastodon account over plain SSH. Chafa and XTerm. It works.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I don't have any newsletter, but for Mastodon:

         - Compile tut, it just requires Go, it will run on any modern OS. 
         
         - Login with tut
         
         - Set a 'tview' shell (sh) script as 
           
           #/bin/sh
           chafa  -f sixel --fit-width "$@" | less -r"
            reset 

         - Configure tut, set program=tview in the [media.image] section.

         - Then launch XTerm as 'xterm -ti 340'.  Edit ~/.Xresources so you have nice fonts:

            xterm*background: black
           xterm*foreground: white
           xterm*loginShell: true
           xterm*faceName: Monospace
           xterm*faceSize: 10
           xterm*geometry: 100x32
           xterm*metaSendsEscape: true
 
 
           xterm*decTerminalID: vt340
          xterm*numColorRegisters: 256
          xterm*sixelScrolling: 1
          xterm*sixelScrollsRight: 1

Done. Edit the facesize value to a bigger font if you have a big resolution. Run "xrdb ~/.Xdefaults" to get the changes.

Also, you can run chafa locally with images such as "chafa -f sixel --fit-with foo.img', no need to login into a VPS, of course, it just was a proof of concept that you could see images over SSH. This can be really useful for instance to read graph/plots with Gnuplot or similar tools.

If any, subscribe to T3X's news letter and get some books, as these small tools will pay a lot in near future. No AI crap, small enough to run on some sets, from Statistics to semi-advanced math (even Zenlisp being crap can do complex numbers, and you can adapt the code for instance for S9 so that interpreter Scheme understand complex numbers and a much faster speed).

Yeah, Python+SAGEMATH, CUDA with number crunching and the like. How much are the GPU's, CPU's and SSD's going nowadays in dollars?

Re: Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

#167
post #153

The question is - why do we still need the terminal abstraction at all?

The terminal is keystroke-driven. It's character-selectable. It's reliable in a way that the GUI is not. When I drop frames, I can still enter the commands to rescue myself with some assurance they'll be interpreted, eventually. I agree, a REPL isn't Unixy in the streams of text kind of way... or is it?

Let me add more! PIPES.

It's a bit more abstract and useful than "character-selectable" when viewed at the byte-level abstraction.

The ability to chain together utilities with no complicated data structures is extremely flexible. One of my favorite current use-cases is using FFmpeg to process RTSP streams that send output (e.g. high quality stream for recording, low quality low FPS for processing, max quality low FPS for stills, etc) to separate file descriptors. FFmpeg doesn't care whats on the other end (e.g. redirect to file, read via Python, etc) due to these lovely abstractions.

Reliability translates directly to scriptability. Yes, you can create monsters, but through the use of sub-shells and pipes I think it's the fastest, cheapest, most concise way to pull off some really cool multiprocessing tricks.

Re: Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terry A Davis already did this. It was as crazy then as it is now

Obligatory Temple OS unhinged video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o48KzPa42_o Joking apart, the whole thing was both an exercise in madness and genius. Sometimes I wonder what he would have done if he had not gone crazy. We will never know...

He'd probably be writing poison pill generators for AI, obfuscation tools (in the vein of public key crypto, but using entirely plaintext, in a style similar to Cockney rhyming slang) for social media posting. He was pretty anarchistic and antiestablishment. I'm sure we'd still see that coming through.
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