Support for rendering images (Kitty Graphics, SIXEL, iterm2 image)

[remorses]

SIXEL allows you to render images in the terminal, this would be great for a project I am working on, Termcast: reimplementing Raycast in the terminal, to show extensions icons.

Most popular terminals already support SIXEL:

Terminal	SIXEL?	Notes
xterm	Yes	Native SIXEL + XTSMGRAPHICS to query max geometry.
WezTerm	Yes	Also supports iTerm2/kitty image protocols; default max ~25M px/image via imgcat.
iTerm2 (macOS)	Yes	Supported since 3.3; includes a SIXEL feature test (e.g., print snake.six). Also supports IIP.
GNOME Terminal (VTE)	No (varies)	Upstream VTE has work/flags; many distro builds ship without SIXEL. Some Flatpaks/bundles may enable it.
Konsole (KDE)	Yes	Since KDE Gear 22.04.
Windows Terminal	Yes	Added in Preview 1.22, mainline in 1.23.
VS Code (integrated terminal)	Yes	Uses xterm.js addon; supports SIXEL & IIP. Enabled since v1.80 (toggle: terminal.integrated.enableImages).
kitty	No	Won’t implement SIXEL; uses its own graphics protocol instead.
Alacritty	No	No built-in SIXEL (there are third-party/fork experiments).
foot (Wayland)	Yes	Supported (e.g., since 1.2.0).

Here is a website with more in depth support for SIXEL: https://www.arewesixelyet.com/

Also Alacritty has an active PR to add support for it here

Ghostty still does not support SIXEL but it supports Kitty graphics protocol

[kevcube]

I have a feature in mind which relies on image support, This would be great to have. In my case I am a kitty user now checking out Ghostty, both support kitty's image protocol. I would vote for supporting that protocol over sixel, according to my read of @.kovidgoyal's thoughts kitty's protocol is more modern.

[lmdevv]

I am also building a feature which I would love to have image support, preferably supporting kitty graphics since I am in ghostty and hopefully this could be implemented

[kommander]

My thought around this was to have an ImageRenderable that takes an url, which can be a local path/url/base64 and uses a fallback system of:

• if kitty graphics is supported, draw with kitty graphics
• fallback to sixel
• fallback to buffer drawing super sampled blocks (what webgpu currently uses)

I am not sure how to support this in the layered buffers though, as in mark a region in a buffer as image data and does kitty graphics allow drawing over the image or would that be highest level etc. Open to suggestions here.

[tommerty]

+1 for this. I have a link in bio platform that we're also planning on building a terminal app for to quickly load users profiles and being able to showcase the profile image or icons via kitty graphics would be incredible

[msmps]

I've picked this up and hope to land this soon 👍

[remorses]

Wow amazing! Terminals are never going to be the same

[remorses]

I plan to use this feature for creating a video editor in the terminal

I would need shared memory support for this so it is more performant.

@msmps is your branch published? I would love to help