I've started building a TUI for Lemmy
files.catbox.moe
I'm not sure this is the right community.
I've been hoping for a TUI frontend for Lemmy for a while, but unfortunately none came out and I've decided to build a proof of concept on my own.
It's written in python with pythorhead, blessed and chafa.py and it's quite janky.
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For rendering high quality images in the terminal, check out the Kitty graphical protocol. I don't know if they are any python libraries to use, but I think that they are. P.S. This seems to work well https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58138638/how-to-display-graphical-images-in-kitty-terminal-using-python
I went with chafa as it's terminal agnostic and supports various modes.
Then again, I'm not really sure a tui frontend needs high quality image rendering. Earlier I even considered going completely 1bit braille or just ASCII just so that the image doesn't take all of the focus at the expense of the post body.
As mentioned by another commenter, I believe opening the full image in an external viewer is a much better solution, not to mention easier to implement.
You could also look into using sixel. It's kinda like the kitty protocol but older and terminal agnostic.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
Thanks, I've only heard of sixel, but never really read into it. Sounds promising.
A suggestion is do it like neofetch and let the user choose. Amazing work.
does this protocol work for other terminals? such as alacritty, foot, urxvt, or even st (with appropriate patch ofc)?
A quick research tells me that there aren't patches for other emulators, but the protocol seems well described, so making those patches is possible. I could also take a look at Alacritty source code and deicide if I could make this project work.