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by capitainenemo 798 days ago
IMO the best results out there are with chafa right now. https://hpjansson.org/chafa/gallery/

It also has some basic ffmpeg support.

And yeah, there are sixels and native rendering of graphics in terminals, but I still find this handy if I'm a couple of tmux sessions deep on a remote server and I need to figure out which graphic is which.
1 comments
kernelsanderz 798 days ago
I just noticed that tmux has some basic sixel support now - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmux/tmux/3.4/CHANGES

discovered at https://www.arewesixelyet.com/

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capitainenemo 798 days ago
I guess it'll take a while for that to propagate. I wonder how well it works with nested tmux sessions and multiple servers. Also I do have the issue with terminals support. Regrettably the assigned work computer is still Windows, and I've been using putty there. If you know of a good sixel terminal for windows..

Anyway, Chafa's results are darn good IMO. The images in the gallery don't I feel showcase how well it matches against organic forms. And it handles a wide variety of images. SVG etc.

Even when I have access to pixels, I find on slow connections Chafa can be a decent form of compression :) For example, I was using the ffmpeg patch to play a video remotely to figure out what it was and while I could have relayed it with ssh -YC , Chafa was simply a lot more performant due to it being a lossy transformation. Kinda like playing the video in a VNC session with jpeg loss cranked up to max, but without the need to fire that up.

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