[Feature request] display images using kitty kitten icat

[ser]

Kitty terminal has built-in image previews:

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/icat/

I think it would be cool to utilise it in clipse and probably super easy to deploy.

[savedra1]

Hi @ser 👋

Thank you for raising this!

Are you suggesting that icat could be used as an alternative method for rendering the image previews? I assume this would only be possible for users of kitty? I'll investigate the benefits to doing this (better image quality for example) and see if it would be worth implementing 😄

[ser]

Yes, we are limited to kitty users only, but it's a really fast and simple to use image rendering.

[howyay]

Are you suggesting that icat could be used as an alternative method for rendering the image previews? I assume this would only be possible for users of kitty? I'll investigate the benefits to doing this (better image quality for example) and see if it would be worth implementing 😄

I believe that it won't be worth implementing this feature specifically for kitty's protocol. It's likely more preferable to make the rendering pipeline entirely customizable - this way, users of terminals that support sixel can use sixel.

[ztmzzz]

I have successfully displayed images in terminals (foot) that support Sixel. Are there any plans to add this feature? There is still some work to be done, such as adjusting the display position and attempting to fallback to the original method, etc.

[savedra1]

I have successfully displayed images in terminals (foot) that support Sixel. Are there any plans to add this feature? There is still some work to be done, such as adjusting the display position and attempting to fallback to the original method, etc.

Wow @ztmzzz that looks great!

I'm low on free time at the moment but if you raise this as a PR I can certainly look into getting that implemented into the core project. The only thing to be aware of for something like this is to add a check for the terminal environment at the start of the program, so clipse knows which protocol to use for displaying images (Sixel/iCat etc) as each environment will have its own supported methods. In most cases this can be retrieved with os.Getenv("TERM") but some environments may differ in how that value is ascertained.

Also if Sixel requires being installed as a separate dependency, that's something else the program would need to check/handle.

I appreciate you looking into this, thanks 😄

[ztmzzz]

I use go-sixel to encode images. It might be need to maintain a list to check terminal support or let users enable this feature in configuration file (I prefer this approach).
Sixel support is determined by the user's terminal and doesn't require installing extra packages.