Consider Sixel Support

I think this is an amazing project! The only problem are images and some UI elements that need some rendering. I think sixel might be the best alternative, it's pretty lightweight and has support on a lot of terminals.

[nbritton]

I came here to say exactly the same thing, this would actually be a very viable terminal based web browser if it had support for DEC's Sixel standard that they produced for the VT200 and VT300 series terminals in the 1980s, short for "six pixels", it is a bitmap graphics format supported by the industry standard VT220 terminal type. It should be trivial to add native sixel support into carbonyl using the work of the libsixel project. https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

I don't have any time to help right now but I can really see the value of a Crome based terminal browser that has proper sixel support, especially in the world of infrastructure management where you can't typically access a GUI at the remote end to do things like launch a web browser within the local environment to work with stupid things like Jenkins CI/CD pipelines.

Technical References:
https://www.vt100.net/docs/vt3xx-gp/chapter14.html
https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vax90b1/krypton-nasa/all-about-sixels.text

$ brew install libsixel

[chrispollitt]

YES! That would be wonderful! Sixel is supported on all three major platforms:

• Windows (mintty via Cygwin)
• Linux (mlterm)
• MacOS (iTerm2)

YES! That would be wonderful! Sixel is supported on all three major platforms:

• Windows (mintty via Cygwin)
• Linux (mlterm)
• MacOS (iTerm2)

Also, there are a lot of alternatives, I use foot terminal for example. More supported terminals can be found here.

[nbritton]

I was under the impression that any terminal that is fully compliant with the DEC VT220 terminal standard has native support for Sixel. It's basically just some clever use of ANSI escape sequences from what I recall.

From Wikipedia:

[aicynide]

https://www.arewesixelyet.com/

[aicynide]

Imagine developing a terminal browser and not aware about sixel

[fathyb]

I originally planned to add a SIXEL back-end (some work in src/output/quantizer.rs), but ended up not focusing on it as the terminal support is poor for a realtime use-case (at least on macOS). For example, iTerm2 writes each SIXEL frame into a file in /tmp and displays it using an image view. Someone shared alacritty-sixel which seems like a good playground for that.

I'm planning on releasing a separate software to render any Wayland app to SIXEL such as Firefox, which would remove the need to depend on a Chromium fork.

[fathyb]

A new renderer landed in the main branch. Still no SIXEL, but works almost everywhere hehe:

$ docker run -ti -e COLORTERM=24bit fathyb/carbonyl:next https://youtube.fr/ --zoom=300 --bitmap

CleanShot.2023-02-14.at.05.44.26.mp4

[X-Ryl669]

Isn't that cheating (using one character per pixel and reducing the font size to 1px or so so it's not a giant mess) ?

[bitcoinmeetups]

Hi,

I'm Mr. You, a very friendly guy.

I also support the idea of sixel graphics for carbonyl.

Actually the sixel concept could probably be improved. It's a bit slow and I don't really believe in the idea of using escape characters. But until Terminals can conveniently display graphics some other way natively I'd say sixel support might be a good idea.