Re: Bug#931534: ITP: viu -- Command-line application to view images from the terminal

[Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>]

On Sun, Jul 07, 2019 at 11:25:47AM +0200, Wolfgang Silbermayr wrote:
>    Package name: viu
> Upstream Author: Atanas Yankov <atanas.yankov98@gmail.com>
>             URL: https://github.com/atanunq/viu
>     Description:
> viu is a small command-line application to view images from the terminal
> written in Rust. It uses unicode lower half blocks to fit 2 pixels into
> a single cell by adjusting foreground and background colors accordingly.

Hi!
This looks exactly as what "catimg" does -- is there are any reason to
prefer viu over catimg?

And if you drop the requirement of a fixed 1x2 half-block grid but allow
dividing character cells in other ways, the results are DRASTICALLY better.
This is done by "chafa".  You can also restrict chafa to a particular subset
of characters, thus "chafa --symbols vhalf" makes catimg redundant.

Then, for completeness, you can abuse Braille at U+2800, which gives a 2x4
fixed grid (monochromatic or with ZX-Spectrum colors).  Needing to ANSI
codes means the result can be posted in mail or other plain-text media.
My implementation, as pointed out in ITP#856033 discussion like this,
turned out to be redundant with imagemagic's ｢convert foo.png foo.ubrl｣.

Thus: is there anything viu does better than the above tools?


Meow!
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