terminals with native HTML support

[PerBothner]

The DomTerm terminal emulator (and possibly others) support native embedding of fairly general HTML, including images. See features with screenshots; especially analogous to nu are these Python goodies. Inspired by the Jupyter support, I was able to get these working "by hand":

ls | to-html | domterm hcat
open foo.jpg | to-html | domterm hcat

Is there some way to automatically add the equivalent of | to-html | domterm hcat to each command? I see how the Jupyter shell does it, but that loses the benefit of a traditional shell, including the native input editor and being to run programs like emacs. The Python support (linked to above) uses the Python _repr_html__ hook, but that may not be appropriate for nu.

The domterm hcat command essentially wraps standard input with some simple escape sequences so it could be replaced by some simple shell code or an option to to-html.

[sophiajt]

I like this idea - we currently imply | autoview when interactive via the cli, and the jupyter support assumes it can put | to-html at the end of each call, which generally works okay.

I think what we might want is a way to set a variable in config that will add a different automatic end to the pipeline.

If you're interested, I can talk you through how you could add something like that.

[PerBothner]

I have zero experience with Rust - though I am a programming-languages guy, and have been interested in it for a while, so I can probably give it a shot.

I assume you mean a way to replace | autoview with a custom pipe-line consumer, at the shell level?
I took a quick glance at autoview.rs and to_html.rs. Neither are super complicated - but they're not something you want people to have to write.

It might be reasonable to extend to-html with options for arbitrary strings (escape sequences) that would be prepended and appended to the output. That would avoid the need to execute domterm hcat (or the equivalent for other UIs). Also, a to-html option to specify "I'm in autoview context" might be useful for future tweaking of the generated html.

[github-actions]

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[github-actions]

This issue has been marked stale for more than 10 days without activity. Closing this issue, but if you find that the issue is still valid, please reopen.

[PerBothner]

Perhaps this issue should be re-opened now that PR #6786 exists, I believe this requires a maintainer.

[sophiajt]

Closing, as Nushell's focus for 1.0 is trying to be broad rather than lighting up functionality for specific terminals.