I run Kitty and use this feature regularly. Most of the time, I rely on it within Yazi [1], a TUI file manager, but I can also display plots within the Julia REPL, thanks to the KittyTerminalImages.jl package [2]. It's even more crucial when I'm navigating a remote directory and need to check an image file, as I usually have timg [3] installed on those servers. Once you discover how valuable this is, it becomes a permanent part of your workflow.

[1] https://yazi-rs.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/simonschoelly/KittyTerminalImages.jl

[3] https://github.com/hzeller/timg

I have to say, (caveat, I have not tried any of these yet) that I am intrigued by all these features like graphics being added to terminals. It feel like exploring an alternate timeline 1990s where the GUI “lost” — of course in the absence of a successful Windows and Macintosh, terminals would have naturally gained these graphical abilities 30 years ago.

It’s pretty nice to ssh into a remote host and plot some data there without needing either X forwarding, or dumping to files and rsync’ing, or similar workarounds.

Yes, pictures. It's quite useful. Opening images on remotes for one. Viewing plots arbitrary python scripts create for another.

Off the top of my head.

The alacritty maintainers reject any image protocols as unnecessary. I am fond of images in terminals, but I gotta say that I respect their decision, very good call. Not every terminal emulator should do the same.

Viewing an image in a terminal can be really handy for debugging ML systems that use images or bitmaps. You can also paste images directly into claude code as context.

Once while working on a daemon that did both ML and DSP on live audio I added the ability to play sounds and display spectrographs of in-memory audio data at various points of the internal pipeline to debug an issue that would have been difficult otherwise. Way quicker than dumping WAV files to view externally.

I'm not particularly fond of displaying images on the terminal in ways that would resemble a GUI.

That said, augmenting a shell-based workflow with tidbits such as this had me sold:

https://xcancel.com/thingskatedid/status/1316074032379248640...

https://xcancel.com/thingskatedid/status/1316075850580652032...

To achieve that, either Sixel or Kitty protocol is fine. IIRC Sixel works over SSH without any fuss, dunno about Kitty.

I’ve found it useful, when paired with a terminal file manager, to preview graphics in the terminal.

It would be nice if matplotlib or Octave could display pretty plots and figures on a remote server, in the terminal.

Images in a terminal emulator is neat for stuff like `ranger`

FWIW The definitive thread on "images in terminals" is probably found in these threads:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/...

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/...

there's lengthy discussion from just about everyone at this point in those threads, about why images in terminals is Hard

One of my pet proof of concept projects is figuring out how to ergonomically tunnel web apps over ssh without needing to fiddle with listen ports and port forwards. First attempt was to push http2 over stdio which actually worked, but it didn't really integrate well with terminal use. Currently I think similar approach to X forwarding makes sense, where SSH forwards one unix socket over ssh connection and then the applications can connect to that socket and put http2 traffic over that connection. Basically the idea is to make webapp tunneling as easy as X tunneling, so you can just type command in shell and (browser) window would pop open without any extra hassle. The neat thing is that because http2 has persistent connections with multiplexing etc built in, it works really well for this sort of hack; plain http 1.0 would be far more annoying.

> I wish there was a high performance way of remoting graphics over SSH. How cool would it be if you could SSH to a remote machine and it just showed you the remote desktop in the terminal itself? No messing around with port forwarding, weird X servers, etc

I think there's at least three different experiences here, and they're all valid, but I don't know what you really want.

A) remote desktop --- connect to a fully formed desktop environment (with SSH to authenticate, I guess?), possibly persisted and/or shared so you can connect back and get into the same place or share with another user?

B) run a program remotely and display it on your local terminal; essentially remote X, but I gather you're looking for more performance and maybe some other nice to haves? Maybe you want to transport audio too... Maybe you don't want the crap experience remote X has become since app developers don't spend any effort on it and you kind of get what you get, which is a lot of jank.

C) images in the terminal, with high performance. PNG should be ok for that, right? Maybe an extension for lossy compression might be nice depending.

At that point you're really better off using some other remoting protocol instead of trying to tunnel it all over a terminal session. There's nothing left of the original terminal.

drawterm under Unix clients and 9front cpu connections; but that's Unix Philosphy 2.0.