Comment by csdvrx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csdvrx | Hacker News Reader

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I find the comments here a bit sad: some say it's "pointless stuff" and Microsoft should now stop working on WT as it's "good enough", others say "8, maybe 16 distinct colors" are all that's needed.

I just can't agree with that: I want 24 bit colors in my terminal, I want images, I want alpha blending, I want fonts with advanced attributes...

Fortunately, there are a few other people like me. We treasure Windows Terminal (and Foot on Wayland) as in 2022 it is one of the rare terminals that is still evolving and adding features.

Pull requests like this one (#11623) and the work that went behind it (exploring the LUT caching issues) are extremely encouraging: they demonstrate there is still a lot of progress possible, with many low hanging fruits!

Personally, I'm eagerly waiting for Sixel support in WT, until then I suggest https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux to derasterize sixels and show them even in terminals that don't support sixels.

If you find such things interesting, check https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1223 and the notcurses project: a great introduction is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4lmMADP1lA

I don't know if I need 24 bit colors in my terminal, but I agree that being satisfied with such crappy performance when you go a little above "typical" is pretty lame. Software doesn't need to suck, and I appreciate people who want to make it better for better's sake.

One of the reasons the "terminal" (the old console subsystem) stagnated in Windows for so long was that they assigned ownership of it to the same team that owned Explorer (the local one, not IE) and for basically every release up to Windows 8.1 they weren't able to get any budget to improve it. It wasn't until then that people started to realize that the console wasn't just a relic from the past that we would eventually shed, but something that played a serious role in software engineering and IT.

One of the silly limitations it had as a result of this neglect was that it was impossible to run cmd.exe with an arbitrary set of foreground and background colors because it was limited to using a set of 7 unique color schemes stored in the registry. I used to (like 15 years ago) have a hack script for this called colorcmd that would take the fg and bg color hex as arguments. The dirty trick was that the registry keys for the color sets were named for the actual executable that was being run, and I would just make a symlink to cmd.exe called eg colorcmd_RRGGBB_RRGGBB.exe (with the actual rgb hex), create the registry entries for it, then run that exe. Now it seems odd to me to even want many different colors of console (I used to use them for differentiating purpose or project) but that was a fun little workaround at the time.

I think you’re looking for a browser. I use a terminal to get away from that noise.

You are free to remain stuck in old paradigms if you so prefer.

Adding features adds possibilities.

Nobody will force you to use them.

I 100% agree. It's crazy that terminals haven't really changed since the 80s.

That said I really hope we don't settle for Sixel. It's obsolete and inefficient. We should make a new standard. I think there's enough commonality between 2D drawing APIs (Cairo, Skia, HTML Canvas, etc) that you could easily define a terminal API for one.

> That said I really hope we don't settle for Sixel. It's obsolete and inefficient.

That's a questionable assertion, as some people report watching movies in a terminal with mpv -vo sixel

This is possible because sixels are widely supported, which is the most important part of any format: you can then build on the existing ecosystem and showcase new uses at the same time.

> We should make a new standard

Even if we assume getting everything right on the very first try, the odds of success of starting a new standard + having it supported by the various apps (ex: gnuplot, mpv...) are much lower than having terminals support the existing standard then implementing the new standard in apps / in the terminals.

Sixels exists and can be used right now.

Yeah I guess Sixel is better than nothing. I just hope we don't stop at that and say "job done".

among unique features of Foot, which one would you call the most useful?

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