On Thursday, 23 February 2012 at 21:17:35 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Taking the idea of an in-terminal video player further, what about a general escape sequence for "application-specific output"?
<html>..... seriously, once you take the in-terminal stuff too far, you have a beast of a program that does everything; you end up with something like a web browser or nested X server, and you've lose the original beauty of the terminal. This is the path I started on, and ended up with what I called the D Windowing System - which is still on my todo list, but has been for a long time and will surely be for a long time more. But, I started with a terminal that can optionally output images. Then wanted improved character display and figured if it does images, it can be a bitmap drawable. Then wanted multiple channels... and at this point, you have a poor man's X. Realizing this, I went full into it and shifted gears to a higher level X kind of thing, where you make an app based on widgets on a grid, which would work in text mode or graphical mode. But, I didn't get too far before work took over my time. But, on a terminal, I just don't think images are a fit there. Might as well just make something like a gui image viewer app and keep a more traditional terminal. Though, I'd prefer to be more like vga text mode than VT100 in terms of capabilities.
