image preview often disappears in st.

[crocket]

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug report

RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT

• Operating system and version: Gentoo Linux
• Terminal emulator and version: st-0.7.0
• Python version: python 3.4.5 [GCC 4.9.4]
• Ranger version/commit: ranger-master 1.9.0b5 20f0f2b
• Locale: en_US.utf8

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR

The image preview should remain intact, no matter what I do.

CURRENT BEHAVIOR

When I press shift in st, the image preview disappears.
If I revisit the image, the image preview reappears until I press shift or any other key.
The image preview disappears after a few seconds automatically.
It also disappears if I shift the focus to another window.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

It doesn't happen in uxterm, but uxterm doesn't support fontconfig which st supports well.
I must have proper fontconfig support to read chinese characters in ranger.

I could use urxvt, but urxvt doesn't support fontconfig properly.

[crocket]

@SageEx According to #759 (comment), I set xfps to 300, but st fails to display image previews consistently.

[SageEx]

Yep, I have this problem too, I just refresh the view by <C-L> once it vanishes. I'd like a proper solution too.

On Sat 22 Apr, 2017, 1:35 PM crocket, ***@***.***> wrote: @SageEx <https://github.com/SageEx> According to #759 (comment) <#759 (comment)>, I set xfps to 300, but st fails to display image previews consistently. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#856 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AGz56-jAiKmFUGXit0hhogUgcUxIrdYJks5rybTPgaJpZM4NE_ZW> .

-- Arindam Banerjee

[crocket]

w3mimgdisplay is slow and doesn't work with other terminals than xterm and urxvt.

A developer of st said he would implement SIXEL in st within a few months.
I think it'd be great for ranger to take advantage of the upcoming SIXEL support in st.

[crocket]

Luke Smith who runs a YouTube channel said this issue will be fixed in a few months, but he didn't provide me with an evidence. Does anyone have any evidence that this issue will be fixed?

[toonn]

They usually do : ) No one's stepped forward to implement sixel support yet. Tbqh, I'd rather st implement Kitty's image protocol from some short looking into this it seems like it's superior to sixel and kitty preview support is coming soon™.
Anyone can implement sixel previews for ranger though, it'd definitely get merged.

[crocket]

@toonn Actually, saitoha, the maintainer of sixel, implemented sixel support for st, but st maintainers haven't accepted his patches, yet.

https://gist.github.com/saitoha/70e0fdf22e3e8f63ce937c7f7da71809

https://git.suckless.org/st/log/

Will kitty preview support actually come to ranger or any terminal emulator soon? Can you refer me to evidences?

[toonn]

@crocket look at PR #1077, you can already run it if you somewhat know your way around git. Don't know of plans to get it in other terminal emulators though.
Upcoming sixel support in st is great. If you want it bad enough you could base an implementation on that PR ; )

[crocket]

@toonn That is not a pull request. Saitoha patched a lot of programs to add support for sixel, but all programs seem to have rejected his sixel patches for years. App developers are consistently delaying or rejecting sixel. Because suckless is obsessed with minimal codebase, I don't think sixel will be merged into st in the forseeable future.

It's very likely for suckless developers to say that people don't need image support in terminal emulators. Suckless developers rejected innate scroll support for st, too.

I moved from st to alacritty, but I'll move again to kitty once ranger assimilates kitty image preview functionality. w3m fails to persist image previews in alacritty.

I badly want persistent ranger image preview.

[toonn]

#1077 is most definitely a PR, I've been reviewing it since it was opened.

[crocket]

@toonn I was not talking about #1077. I was talking about https://gist.github.com/saitoha/70e0fdf22e3e8f63ce937c7f7da71809 which has a slim chance of getting into st.

[toonn]

Ah, then you'll have to patch both st and ranger with sixel support, should be easy for st since the code's minimal. Might be relatively simple for ranger too.

[crocket]

I moved away from st because st will not accept sixel or any extra feature into its core. https://gist.github.com/saitoha/70e0fdf22e3e8f63ce937c7f7da71809 will rot away because the core will move on.

At this point, kitty would be the fastest way to get persistent image preview in ranger.
Sixel support for Alacritty is not planned, yet.

[toonn]

Ok. I'm going ahead and closing this issue since there's probably nothing we can do about it. I suspect this would have to be fixed in w3mimgdisplay itself.

[alkeryn]

Sorry for the necrobump but anyone know the version at whitch the sixel patch was made
could make it easier to update it going up in the git

[UgurcanAkkok]

I had the same issue, changing w3m_delay to 0.2 (in rc.conf) fixed the issue of dissappearing instantly/randomly, after any key press it still disappears but at least i can preview images now.

[libre-hackerman]

This patch made the previews with w3m work flawlessly (I applied it to st 0.8.4)

[sevi-kun]

I still had the problem with this st build
I fixed it with setting set w3m_delay to 0.1 instead of 0.02 in the ranger config.