Image display without Ueberzug

[yingzhu146]

This plugin is literally all I ever wanted. Can't tell you how pumped I am. However, I'm, like so many, running Mac so this doesn't work right now.
(Not telling you anything new here probably but ueberzug isn't available on Mac)
Looks like #14 is a very good possible solution.

[dccsillag]

This plugin is literally all I ever wanted. Can't tell you how pumped I am.

Glad to hear it! It really warms my heart.

However, I'm, like so many, running Mac so this doesn't work right now.
(Not telling you anything new here probably but ueberzug isn't available on Mac)

I actually still had some hope that Ueberzug would work on Mac; evidently, it does not. This (more cross-platform image display) now becomes a bit of a priority for this project, then.

Looks like #14 is a very good possible solution.

What in there is a good possible solution? The image providers framework or support for hologram.nvim? (Remember that hologram.nvim only supports the Kitty protocol for now.)

Regardless, I'm actually experimenting with making my own ueberzug-esque image display method for terminals, and one of my goals is to be quite cross-platform -- so that could be of help. I might need some help soon for actually testing things on Mac, though.

[yingzhu146]

This plugin is literally all I ever wanted. Can't tell you how pumped I am.

Glad to hear it! It really warms my heart.

However, I'm, like so many, running Mac so this doesn't work right now.
(Not telling you anything new here probably but ueberzug isn't available on Mac)

I actually still had some hope that Ueberzug would work on Mac; evidently, it does not. This (more cross-platform image display) now becomes a bit of a priority for this project, then.

Looks like #14 is a very good possible solution.

What in there is a good possible solution? The image providers framework or support for hologram.nvim? (Remember that hologram.nvim only supports the Kitty protocol for now.)

Hologram.nvim - because it supports kitty. alacritty/alacritty#910 (comment) interesting discussion here, @dankamongmen built the really awesome https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses and sounds like kitty is the best solution available for terminal images right now

Regardless, I'm actually experimenting with making my own ueberzug-esque image display method for terminals, and one of my goals is to be quite cross-platform -- so that could be of help. I might need some help soon for actually testing things on Mac, though.

More than happy to test - just as disclaimer, I don't do CISC anymore, so I'm on an arm64 M1.

Again thanks a million, this can plugin can literally become huge for all data science people! Just needs Mac support, some good testing, a cool logo and a discord channel and maybe a YouTube walkthrough - looks like that's a good recipe for fast plugin adoption

[dankamongmen]

happy to help if you have any Notcurses questions!

[dccsillag]

Hologram.nvim - because it supports kitty. alacritty/alacritty#910 (comment) interesting discussion here, @dankamongmen built the really awesome https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses and sounds like kitty is the best solution available for terminal images right now

Gotcha. Just need to be careful because we don't wan't to force people to use Kitty (that's why I initially went with Ueberzug) -- I think what we are developing with multiple possible image providers is the way to go for that, so that we can support cool things like the Kitty image protocol as well as providing methods which work on most terminal emulators, such as Ueberzug and viu.

More than happy to test - just as disclaimer, I don't do CISC anymore, so I'm on an arm64 M1.

Thanks! Once I have something concrete I'll give an update here.

Again thanks a million, this can plugin can literally become huge for all data science people! Just needs Mac support, some good testing, a cool logo and a discord channel and maybe a YouTube walkthrough - looks like that's a good recipe for fast plugin adoption

That's the plan! One step at a time, though :P

[dankamongmen]

Hologram.nvim - because it supports kitty. alacritty/alacritty#910 (comment) interesting discussion here, @dankamongmen built the really awesome https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses and sounds like kitty is the best solution available for terminal images right now

I'd also consider WezTerm quite strong, along with Foot on Wayland. the author of iTerm2 agreed literally just this morning to make the necessary changes to support Notcurses-style graphics, so look for improvement there this year. Xterm is faithful, if slow, much like MLterm. Contour is an up-and-comer.

if you use Notcurses, you'll be able to target all of them through one API, and also the Linux console framebuffer on top of that. on terminals which don't have pixel graphics, it'll fall back seamlessly to Unicode sextants. doing all of this is non-trivial, so if you really want a terminal-portable solution, i ummm don't mean to spam your issue-tracker, but there's really only one game in town =]. like i said, happy to help with any questions or troubles.

[dccsillag]

I'd also consider WezTerm quite strong, along with Foot on Wayland. the author of iTerm2 agreed literally just this morning to make the necessary changes to support Notcurses-style graphics, so look for improvement there this year. Xterm is faithful, if slow, much like MLterm. Contour is an up-and-comer.

Interesting -- these things have advanced much more than I thought.

if you use Notcurses, you'll be able to target all of them through one API, and also the Linux console framebuffer on top of that. on terminals which don't have pixel graphics, it'll fall back seamlessly to Unicode sextants. doing all of this is non-trivial, so if you really want a terminal-portable solution, i ummm don't mean to spam your issue-tracker, but there's really only one game in town =]. like i said, happy to help with any questions or troubles.

Yeah, notcurses will definetly be one of our image providers. I'm sold :)

(I hope it works fine from inside neovim, what with its stdout trickery... will check later.)

I think we'll still keep our image provider abstraction, though, because I also want to support things like Ueberzug, which I'd say are a bit outside of notcurses' domain. But even then, notcurses will definetly be of great help!!

[yingzhu146]

Just cheering from the sidelines here guys, thanks a ton to both of you, you're both legends! might even be able to revive/redirect the discussion upstream wrt to terminal graphics (neovim/neovim#12991) if we can show a cool implementation here, possibly switching to notcurses, always easier to show value with a working implementation that solves a use case.

[dankamongmen]

(I hope it works fine from inside neovim, what with its stdout trickery... will check later.)

you definitely hand off a FILE* to notcurses_init(). it will dump most output there, but also look for a true terminal to do a few queries. so if you've redirected stdout, that's no problem; notcurses will render to stdout (presumably some pipe or something), and walk up to /dev/tty to find the actual terminal type.

unless it's doing something truly bizarre, it should either work, or i can make it work. care to elaborate on the stdout worries?

[dccsillag]

you definitely hand off a FILE* to notcurses_init(). it will dump most output there, but also look for a true terminal to do a few queries. so if you've redirected stdout, that's no problem; notcurses will render to stdout (presumably some pipe or something), and walk up to /dev/tty to find the actual terminal type.

Such foresight.

unless it's doing something truly bizarre, it should either work, or i can make it work. care to elaborate on the stdout worries?

I'm 90% sure it's just a redirection -- the tricky bit is that they do some extra Python magic for remote plugins (which is the mechanism we use) in sys.stdout to try to redirect prints to neovim's message system, so getting the actual stdout is not trivial (but it's also not impossible, if I'm not mistaken we already do it).

[dankamongmen]

I'm 90% sure it's just a redirection -- the tricky bit is that they do some extra Python magic for remote plugins (which is the mechanism we use) in sys.stdout to try to redirect prints to neovim's message system, so getting the actual stdout is not trivial (but it's also not impossible, if I'm not mistaken we already do it).

alright; you seem to know what's going on in the world, so i'll let you be. feel free to mail me directly at nickblack@linux.com, or use our matrix channel, or just file a bug under "userquestions" rather than banging your head against anything. if we need do something weird to deal with this case, we'll do it, as you're not the first person doing in-editor stuff like this. hack on!

[dankamongmen]

oh and though i'm not sure i'm following you completely, if you're willing to work at a C-ish level but need Python for the environment, the cffi-style wrappers are pretty much exactly that, so it would save you a round of going outside python. maybe. python is a mystery to me.

[dankamongmen]

oooh i just saw your little infobox swing in from the right in your README's demo. that's fly as hell! you're going to love notcurses; it's built for exactly that kind of thing. go nuts.

[dccsillag]

alright; you seem to know what's going on in the world, so i'll let you be. feel free to mail me directly at nickblack@linux.com, or use our matrix channel, or just file a bug under "userquestions" rather than banging your head against anything. if we need do something weird to deal with this case, we'll do it, as you're not the first person doing in-editor stuff like this. hack on!

Thanks!! Actually, before you go, I'm struggling to find some documentation for the Python bindings of notcurses; is there any, or should I just base myself on the manpages?

oh and though i'm not sure i'm following you completely, if you're willing to work at a C-ish level but need Python for the environment, the cffi-style wrappers are pretty much exactly that, so it would save you a round of going outside python. maybe. python is a mystery to me.

Cool, thanks; seems like something I might need.

[dccsillag]

Actually, just found the notcuses.lib submodule, which seems to have direct bindings to the C library, so I think I'm OK with docs now.