Support Inline Images Protocol

It would be great if this library would support the Iterm2 Inline Images Protocol for drawing images (as an alternative to the current low-resolution drawImage()). See https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-images.html for details.

See for example this implementation: https://github.com/sindresorhus/ansi-escapes/blob/dcd5ef3c124079c693bef1725044d91b0bca6e7f/index.js#L112-L128

[Digicrat]

I do wish that more terminal emulators supported images … though it looks like that may be on the cusp of changing.

Sixel is another image format, similar to iterm2s (and supposedly supported by as well), that seems to be more widely supported.

It looks like libSixel support isn’t quite mainstream, but it seems to work in iTerm2 and “mlterm” (which is in the Ubuntu package manager and just worked for me). Support is also pending for it in alacritty, and xterm apparently supports it if built from source with the appropriate option.

I haven’t delved too deeply into it, but there is a control sequence that allows for detection of sixel support (and a node package supports-sixel to do this). Ideally then, the existing terminal-kit drawImage could be extended to seamlessly switch to using the sixel format if supported by the terminal, and fallback to the current low-res implementation if not.

[Niek]

Sixel looks interesting but in my limited testing it has 2 issues:

• Lower quality (limited colors) compared to Inline Images Protocol
• High CPU usage when displaying a simple GIF

On the other hand, with Inline Images Protocol it takes much longer to render the initial frame because of the base64 encoding. Also iTerm takes quite some CPU usage too: