{"id":596,"date":"2020-04-01T23:25:15","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T21:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hpjansson.org\/blag\/?p=596"},"modified":"2022-06-19T00:29:49","modified_gmt":"2022-06-18T22:29:49","slug":"chafa-1-4-0-now-with-sixels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hpjansson.org\/blag\/2020\/04\/01\/chafa-1-4-0-now-with-sixels\/","title":{"rendered":"Chafa 1.4.0: Now with sixels"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

April 1st seems like as good a time as any for a new Chafa<\/a> release \u2014<\/em> though note that Chafa is no joke. At least not anymore, what with the extremely enterprise-ready sixel pipeline and all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As usual, you can get it from the download page<\/a> or from Github<\/a>. There are also release notes<\/a>. Here are the highlights:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sixel output<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to this 90s-era technology, you can print excellent-looking graphics directly in the terminal with no need for character cell mosaics or hacky solutions like w3mimagedisplay (from w3m<\/a>) or \u00dcberzug<\/a>. It works entirely using ANSI escape sequence extensions, so it's usable over ssh, telnet and that old 2400 baud modem you found in grandma's shed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most complete existing implementation is probably Hayaki Saito's libsixel<\/a>, but I chose to write one from scratch for Chafa, since sixel output is remarkably intensive computationally, and I wanted to employ a combination of advanced techniques (parallelism, quantization using a PCA approach, SIMD scaling) and corner-cutting that wouldn't have been appropriate in that library. This gets me fast animation playback and makes it easier to phase out the ImageMagick dependency in the long term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are at least two widely available virtual terminals that support sixels: One is XTerm (when compiled with --enable-sixel<\/code>), and the other is mlterm. Unfortunately, I don't think either is widely used<\/em> compared to distribution defaults like GNOME Terminal and Konsole, so here's hoping for more mainstream support for this feature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Glyph import<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

If sixels aren't your cup of tea, symbol mode has a new trick for you too. It's --glyph-file<\/code>, which allows you to load glyphs from external fonts into Chafa's symbol map. This can give it a better idea of what your terminal font looks like and allows support for more exotic symbols or custom fonts<\/a> to suit any respectable retro graphics art project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep in mind that you still need to select the appropriate symbol ranges with --symbols<\/code> and\/or --fill<\/code>. These options now allow specifying precise Unicode ranges, e.g. --symbols 20,41..5a<\/code> to emit only ASCII spaces and uppercase letters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Color extraction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In symbol mode, each cell's color pair is now based on the median color of the underlying pixels instead of the average. Now this isn't exactly a huge feature, at least not in terms of effort, but it can make a big difference for certain images, especially line art. You can get the old behavior back with --color-extractor average<\/code>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April 1st seems like as good a time as any for a new Chafa release \u2014 though note that Chafa is no joke. At least not anymore, what with the extremely enterprise-ready sixel pipeline and all. As usual, you can …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[20,19,22,21,39],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-computing","category-technical","tag-ansi-art","tag-chafa","tag-release","tag-terminal-graphics","tag-textmode"],"yoast_head":"\nChafa 1.4.0: Now with sixels - Et tu, Cthulhu<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/hpjansson.org\/blag\/2020\/04\/01\/chafa-1-4-0-now-with-sixels\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chafa 1.4.0: Now with sixels - Et tu, Cthulhu\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 1st seems like as good a time as any for a new Chafa release \u2014 though note that Chafa is no joke. 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