No I'm not.
> Sixel is a really old and outdated protocol that only supports 6-bit paletted images.
No it doesn't.
sixels can be 16 million colors, that's precisely what the snake.six outputs tests: if you can't see the precise degradation of the snake skin greens and yellows, your terminal is broken.
With so many bad terminals, it's no wonder that a lot of people have such a bad opinion about sixels!
> It would be best if we could just stop talking about sixel altogether, because this is not even what you're referring to anymore. I'm actually concerned that you're conflating these two
Actually, with what you said, I think you're the confused one here. When you could not express in your own words which practical limitations were imposed by sixels, I was 99% sure.
Now I'm 100% sure you have no idea of what you are talking about. Sorry if it's blunt, but take the time to run the tests I've suggested to correct your misconceptions about sixels.
Maybe you'll end up loving the format once you see what it's really capable of?
> I'd love to look into how that's accomplished but I can't use mintty because I use a Mac, sorry. I'm also not really interested in trying to mess with mingw just to get this set up.
Intel macs can run Windows natively. You've also got your pick of emulators, from parallels to vmware, if you roll that way.
So install Windows one way or another, go to msys2.org, download the latest release, click on install. No messing required, mintty is here by default.
You can then use pacman if you want more, which BTW is far better than most of the package managers available on Mac: simply follow the pacman update steps clearly explained with many screenshots on the first page.
Then you'll have an up-to-date msys2 install, with most of the linux tools you want running natively (no WSL involved) or just a `pacman -S` away.
>> In the future, sixel-tmux will intercept sixels live and rewrite them into other format, like iTerm or kitty.
> This is a good idea, please do this instead of trying to get other terminals to adopt Sixel when they are just going to have to replace it down the line anyway.
What you've written makes about as much sense as saying a drawing program should stop trying to support BMP format since it will have to be replaced down the line by JPG or PNG.
gimp, paint and others support many formats. Nobody is complaining. People just click on open. They don't care about the underlying formats.