Re: Implementing image support for kitty terminal

[Tomas Hlavaty]

On Wed 07 Sep 2022 at 16:50, Jose Antonio Ortega Ruiz <jao@gnu.org> wrote:
> At first sight, it looks as if adding support for this protocol to
> emacs's tty terminal (when kitty, or the capability (it seems other
> terminals support the same protocol) is detected) shouldn't be too
> complex, and with that, perhaps, provide direct support for the
> elisp-level image- API for these terminals (so that, for instance,
> doc-view or pdf-tools or displaying images in eww buffers would work out
> of the box).  Am i wrong?

Any work in this direction would be great.

It would help me move emacs-framebuffer
<https://logand.com/sw/emacs-framebuffer/file/emacs-framebuffer.el.html>
forward.  I use w3mimgdisplay there which works on the Linux console.

w3mimgdisplay uses quite similar protocol and also caches the images for
faster redrawing.

There was discussion about some aspects, for example:
id:87zh9hrxfj.fsf@logand.com
id:87czzu7y5r.fsf@logand.com
id:87mtyw9c7f.fsf@logand.com

Unfortunatelly, I think it would require quite a lot of changes to the C
code.

(image-size (create-image "/tmp/a.jpg"))
=> (error "Window system frame should be used")

> On a personal note, if that were possible it would put emacs on a kitty
> terminal on the same league as the full graphical version for my needs,
> with the added benefit of dramatically reduced RAM footprint, faster
> display and, last but not least, a truly great alternative to pgtk in
> wayland.  So, if the implementation is feasible, i'd be willing to help
> if needed.

That was also my motivation for emacs-framebuffer.