Comment by IshKebab

3 days ago

I started working on this with the Kitty image protocol, but unfortunately that protocol is really unsuited to this sort of thing. Performance will be awful.

The protocol is sort of:

1. I'd like you to display this PNG. Here's the data: ...

2. Ok I've got the data.

3. Ok now display it at this position.

4. Ok now remove it from the screen.

We're talking motion-PNG here. Just think about how awful that is.

I wish someone would add some kind of AV1-over-terminal protocol. That would be actually useful.

The other thing I was going to try was a custom GUI that used normal terminal text for the text of widgets, but Kitty images for the rest. It's quite a hard problem though.

7 comments

IshKebab

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f33d5173  3 days ago

What you're describing is a graphical shell. If you want it over the network, we have a protocol for that, it's called X. Misusing a terminal for this is fundamentally pointless.

  • IshKebab  2 days ago

    Nope. X is too slow to be useful except on local networks, and alternatives like FreeNX or xpra are difficulty and janky to set up. Also X is dying so you really mean something like waypipe or worse (which also jankily failed to run some external command when I last tried it).

    But I don't want that anyway. I want something graphical that's actually integrated into the terminal.