[nine_k]

This does look impressive!

I wonder if the bitmap support is limited to terminals which support sixels.

I also wonder what is the CPU price of the raster graphics, flying windows, etc — I suppose it's depends heavily on the terminal emulator? Which of them performed best?

[dankamongmen]

no, Notcurses supports both Sixel and the Kitty protocol (indeed, i proposed https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/3809, which drastically cut down on the bandwidth necessary for certain operations), in addition to the Linux framebuffer console (where we use a direct mmap of the framebuffer). WezTerm recently added support for the Kitty protocol, and indeed Notcurses was used to validate that work: https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/986. i sat down to design the ultimate terminal graphics protocol, and it ended looking so much like Kitty's that i resolved to just advocate terminals pick up that one: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php?title=Spriteful_TE...

btw if you want some insight into how Sixel/Kitty are used together with glyphs, i wrote it up here: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php?title=Theory_and_P...

sorry for the link spam =/

[dankamongmen]

as for performance, i have numbers from the end of 2019 on my wiki: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php?title=Notcurses#Te...

in general, kitty and alacritty are both pretty damn fast. xterm lags behind, and really lags behind if you're using truetype fonts. wezterm wasn't included in these samples; my general impression is that it's behind them both, but catching up quickly. Konsole and VTE-derived terminals are well behind the Kitty/Alacritty forerunners.

if you're using wayland, foot is a masterpiece.

Appendix B of the notcurses book (https://nick-black.com/htp-notcurses.pdf) entitled "Wherein shade is thrown at terminal emulators..." explores this subject in more depth, though still not as completely as i'd have liked.