This is such a good read. I hope this person goes far and gets wider support for this. I really like their project and their motivation.
> Sorry guys, but I don't want you to hold Linux terminal users hostage for your petty concerns over what is the "right" way to do something like sixels. [...] It's something that has been done successfully for over 30 years.
...
> Still, you could successfully block sixel support by having control over the terminal emulators or the libraries. Ok, but now, try to prevent your users from running sixel-tmux!
...
> Also, you guys like to say that the only voices that matters are from those who can code? Hmm, ok for that too. Let's see how you like the code I release to show the pointlessness of your petty fights, and free your users from your questionable decisions.
Also, I wasn't familiar with the term "sixel". They've been around since DEC introduced them in the 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
>This is such a good read. I really like their project and their motivation.
I can't agree. Like most rants, I found it to be very needlessly emotional, lacking in the technical department, and motivating towards the wrong goal (trying to fight and argue with maintainers, accusing them of negative things like "holding users hostage", etc) rather than doing the right thing for users (delivering new and useful features in a way that isn't broken). I wish open source programmers would make less rants and emotionally-driven forks, it's not helpful to someone like me who just wants to get something new like images in their terminal. The issues in the GNOME/WT bug trackers are what actually contain technical information. And just from looking at that, it appears there is an open development branch for VTE that contains sixel support: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/253
So if you use GNOME, I would say just use that and work on that, the quality is going to be better than the degraded functionality you get from de-rasterizing. In my opinion, it would be better from a technical standpoint if the author just wanted to work on that, or wanted to work on getting it implemented proper in WT. The degraded-image approach used by this tmux fork is unusable for the cited use case of getting nice graphs in the terminal, and I can't see how it's going to make it any easier for those other terminals to solve the real technical issues with sixel.
Edit: I also want to respond to this comment in the rant:
>What will happen as Wayland replaces X?
Nothing? XTerm still works. But there is also a Wayland-native terminal called "Foot" that supports sixel, if that's your thing: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot
2nd edit: To those downvoting, please reply to me instead of doing that. If you disagree with me it would be better to know why so I could potentially change my view, a downvote communicates nothing of value towards changing my mind.
echelon|4 years ago
> Sorry guys, but I don't want you to hold Linux terminal users hostage for your petty concerns over what is the "right" way to do something like sixels. [...] It's something that has been done successfully for over 30 years.
...
> Still, you could successfully block sixel support by having control over the terminal emulators or the libraries. Ok, but now, try to prevent your users from running sixel-tmux!
...
> Also, you guys like to say that the only voices that matters are from those who can code? Hmm, ok for that too. Let's see how you like the code I release to show the pointlessness of your petty fights, and free your users from your questionable decisions.
Also, I wasn't familiar with the term "sixel". They've been around since DEC introduced them in the 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
speeddemon|4 years ago
I can't agree. Like most rants, I found it to be very needlessly emotional, lacking in the technical department, and motivating towards the wrong goal (trying to fight and argue with maintainers, accusing them of negative things like "holding users hostage", etc) rather than doing the right thing for users (delivering new and useful features in a way that isn't broken). I wish open source programmers would make less rants and emotionally-driven forks, it's not helpful to someone like me who just wants to get something new like images in their terminal. The issues in the GNOME/WT bug trackers are what actually contain technical information. And just from looking at that, it appears there is an open development branch for VTE that contains sixel support: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/253
So if you use GNOME, I would say just use that and work on that, the quality is going to be better than the degraded functionality you get from de-rasterizing. In my opinion, it would be better from a technical standpoint if the author just wanted to work on that, or wanted to work on getting it implemented proper in WT. The degraded-image approach used by this tmux fork is unusable for the cited use case of getting nice graphs in the terminal, and I can't see how it's going to make it any easier for those other terminals to solve the real technical issues with sixel.
Edit: I also want to respond to this comment in the rant:
>What will happen as Wayland replaces X?
Nothing? XTerm still works. But there is also a Wayland-native terminal called "Foot" that supports sixel, if that's your thing: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot
2nd edit: To those downvoting, please reply to me instead of doing that. If you disagree with me it would be better to know why so I could potentially change my view, a downvote communicates nothing of value towards changing my mind.