[easygenes]

The strangest thing to me though is that the OP finished this work last year and sat on it until very recently. They explain it as "I wrote this for a client and didn't feel like sharing it." That attitude seems a bit in contrast to the purported motivation to, "Make it so people don't suffer like I did in school."

So I guess in a way OP is (sort of) seeing the light on free software here too. Don't like it? Fork it!

[_2paq]

Hard forks rarely get traction and are almost always lost in obscurity, unless the original project itself is abandoned. tmux isn't abandoned so I doubt this fork will end up being used by more than a handful of people.

EDIT: Yup, as suspected, the author doesn't intend to keep his fork updated with upstream and I don't blame him for that. This essentially makes this fork a proof of concept, nothing more. Unless it gets merged in tmux itself, people might as well forget that this fork exists.

https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/pull/1

[csdvrx]

Thanks for being understanding.

To be honest, Windows fangirl? guilty as charged!

But I try to keep my personal opinions separate, which is why my rants are on a separate page.

Still, you nailed it: sixel-tmux was made to try to help correct the direction that has been taken, with 6 years wasted.

I believe it's unfair that Linux users have fewer options than us Windows users, due to some people thinking sixel is "uncool".

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Publishing this fork was a last resort move, for the exact reasons you stated: forks are often lost in obscurity.

However, the situation seems to be changing: check the discussion in: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/pull/1 and you'll see there may be some light at the end of the tunnel!

A compile time flag is not ideal, but if at least derasterize can be added by default, so that every tmux user can have some kind of graphics in the terminal, even if said graphics are not sixels but derasterized, that would be "good enough" to me.

[_2paq]

> Thanks for being understanding.

No problem. I know maintaining forks isn't an ideal thing to do and support should ideally land upstream.

> I believe it's unfair that Linux users have fewer options than us Windows users, due to some people thinking sixel is "uncool".

I think the README page of termite pretty much sums up why getting involved in VTE, or any GNOME project for that matter, is a bad decision.

https://github.com/thestinger/termite/blob/master/README.rst...

I'm just a random spectator but perhaps your efforts might've been better spent on an independent terminal project (like Alacritty, for example) rather than trying to get features merged upstream in a GNOME project.

> However, the situation seems to be changing: check the discussion in: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/pull/1 and you'll see there may be some light at the end of the tunnel!

Yeah, I read the entire conversation and if sixel support lands in tmux upstream, it would indeed be good news.

[csdvrx]

> I think the README page of termite pretty much sums up why getting involved in VTE, or any GNOME project for that matter, is a bad decision. > > https://github.com/thestinger/termite/blob/master/README.rst...

Wow, this confirms a lot of my impressions:

>> In 2012, we submitted a tiny patch exposing the APIs needed for the keyboard text selection, hints mode and other features. Despite support from multiple other projects, the patch was rejected. It's now almost a decade later and no progress has been made. There is no implementation of these kinds of features in VTE and it's unlikely they'll be provided either internally or as flexible APIs. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their hostility towards other projects using VTE as a library. GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use.

This is exactly why sixel-tmux exists as a separate entity!

> Yeah, I read the entire conversation and if sixel support lands in tmux upstream, it would indeed be good news.

I'll keep my fingers crossed, but right now, there seems to be a lot of good will. I will do everything I can.

[saladuh]

Apologies for misgendering you. My opinion that you come off like a windows fangirl was mostly due to the other rant you linked in the sixel-tmux rant: https://github.com/csdvrx/cutexterm#wait-i-thought-people-sa...

Here you mention some other things unrelated to terminals, and I was mostly addressing those. It seems to me you want a specific type of experience on Linux, but you can't get that, so therefore dismiss the merits of Linux. I think a lot of your impressions on Linux come from using an X11 based setup instead of Wayland. Completely different beasts, and I think a lot of your grievances would be solved by the latter.

For me, I cannot go back to Windows, ethical reasons aside: Sway on Wayland is perfect for me, and it's what I want out of my computing experience.

I actually agree with a lot that is written in those rants, particularly the VTE and gnome terminal situation. It's just your comments on windows vs linux came across as very personal imo, so I suppose I have retorted here with also a somewhat personal rant.

Also, I don't think either platform has many good terminal choices. Besides mintty, I don't think there are that many good (platform exclusive) terminal emulators on Windows. And on Linux, Foot is one of the few that meets my criteria, including top tier Sixel support (though Wezterm meets my criteria too if it wasn't so slow, hopefully it gets faster). But, for example, I could never really like mintty if I was forced to use Windows, because it lacks features I want.

What I'm trying to say: different needs, different use cases, different tastes. Sorry that my original rant came off so negatively to you and that I wasn't able to convey this point I was trying to make.

[csdvrx]

Uh, no apologies needed, as I don't think such issues really matters (especially online where everyone can be a dog, woof woof!). And it's ok to call out potential prejudice if you think some opinions are unfair.

However, I think my expectations and opinions on terminals are quite fair, and that most people would enjoy an equivalent of mintty if there was one on Linux: it has been polished by years of adding small functionalities that adds up to make a whole that's greater than the sum of the parts.

You seem to generally agree with my takes, so I'm curious, what is lacking in mintty for your own uses? Personally, the only missing functionality that I sometimes regret is tab support.

As for platform exclusives, Windows Terminal has great tab support and is right now the best terminal for someone who doesn't need sixels: the ability to configure different shells ("profiles") is by itself quite admirable. The attention to details (SGR1) and configurability of said details seals the deal: different colors for different tabs of different profiles, so you don't mix your remote sessions!

As for Wayland, I can't say. I may have tried it for 10 minutes or 1 hour then found limitations, and decided it may not give the best argument in favor of Linux so I'd rather skip it. I will try Linux again in 2022, and I'll spend time with foot since everyone seem to love it, so I'll give another try to Wayland!

Besides having a great terminal experience (as I do most of my work there), one of the silly details that matters to me the most is having a consistent white theme which both removes the perception of reflections on glossy displays in the daytime, and allows an easy dark mode if you do a screen inversion + a red shift at the night time. NegativeScreen is a gem to do that on Windows: night mode for every app as soon as you press a button!

If I can't do that on Wayland (no more xrandr) like I do on Windows, the lack of support for themes in future gnome versions worries me, as pure white themes (for eInk) and pure black themes (for OLED) are extremely rare by default.

Still, I would love to be able to use Linux, because I love ZFS, but so far the terminal experience and the UI have kept me firmly in Windows land.

I'll see how the situation evolves... if it doesn't change enough, I may do something weird, like a GPU passthrough with everything on Windows, storage on a zvol handled by Linux as the virtualizer.

[speeddemon]

GNOME isn't dropping themes, that was some misinformation that went around twitter. See this blog from a GNOME developer for more info on what the situation actually is: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a...

Also, there are other wayland environments besides GNOME, so don't feel you have to use that.