@bugaevc@mastodon.technology @ckeen I'm not a huge emacs user either, I sometimes use it with Idris and the Idris shell displays an image on startup
but maybe things like Jupyter are more relevant to the "what if we could render HTML in the terminal" question
$www-browser --dump $file
where www-browser is something like lynx or w3m.
@bugaevc @grainloom @ckeen @lanodan
I appreciate the objection, but printing text extracted by HTML is not rendering HTML for any useful definition of rendering. :-)
#Lynx dump IS rendering but without any interactivity.
Until it ignores #CSS, #JavaScript and any other external resource, it's not a road to #hell.
But integrate the rendering into a terminal emulator and you'll soon face the joy of #JS hijacking your shell.
If a program is hijacking your shell you have a serious Operating System hell.
Anyway elinks has CSS and probable JS support and does work in a terminal.
@lanodan @Shamar @ckeen @grainloom @bugaevc In fact it already has been done multiple times before :
Sometime there is a working PoC sometimes just specs.
On a more serious note: the disability to just render images on screen is the serial line interface heritage.
Plan 9's graphical windows are just graphical windows, you can blit anything on them. Even the shell could, no special support required (apart from generating the right pixels).
@grainloom @ckeen @bugaevc @lord @lanodan
Yet on rio, window + rc cannot intersperse text and graphics: when you need to see an image, you either open a new window or replace the contents of the current one.
AFAIK, you would need a different `window` program and a different shell to do that, exposing to rc a new folder (say /dev/images/) where you can copy an raster image to see it rendered as the output (under the command, before the next prompt).
I wonder if it's worth the effort though.
@Shamar @ckeen @bugaevc@mastodon.technology @lord @lanodan
could it not work like a nested rio session where each (top-level ?) command in rc gets its own /dev/draw while it's running which is drawn under its invocation and after it finished running the multiplexing stuff is dropped and the image is stored with its position
slight problem: how do you echo -n > /dev/text for clearing images as well?
@grainloom @ckeen @bugaevc @lord @lanodan
You don't need a rio: AFAIK you can do most of this scripting a window: each window has it's own /dev/draw and if you cat it's wsys/n/window you get an image to show.
The "problem" is to show, scroll and reflow the immage with the text: simply there is no program that do that on Plan 9.
Actually, it shouldn't be that hard to write (but I've never programmed graphics in Plan 9 for real, just made others' programs work).
But is it a good idea or not?