Comment by csdvrx

> The thing about sixel is it's only supported on old DEC glass terminals, xterm with a non-default configuration, mintty, and several emulators that are fairly unlikely to be preinstalled anywhere

Uh, no?

Just start xterm (say from another xterm) with the correct flag. Sixels are also supported on the BSD console.

The lack of support in the likes of gnome-terminal is a willful and ugly political decision that I've already documented.

> Images are a different matter, where the compromise makes more sense.

Indeed, I love to do remote gnuplots

> I can write a script that vomits a jpeg to some vague common denominator standard and it'll probably work for all my coworkers using a smorgasbord of emulators.

This is the idea of tmux-sixel https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux : intercept sixels sequences and, if your terminal doesn't support it (or if you use the scrollback buffer, to save or RAM), render a unicode representation instead (like Chafa), but if it does, pass through the original sixel sequence.