Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century

jazzyjackson 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I learned about Chafa when I found a video editor that runs in the command line with keyboard control - vic - it just lets you insert split markers and when you exit the video is sliced up into the portions. I really like the low-fi nature of scrobbling through the video, it has low brain overhead.

https://github.com/wong-justin/vic

	▲	jbaber 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wow. Thanks for this recommendation! I have multiple times half-baked something like this using ffmpeg to dump out thumbnails and make cuts.

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nickdothutton 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm currently using this for a teams/zoom/meet replacement for people who work in the terminal. Might even make it to a Show HN some day.

	▲	hpjansson 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This sounds amazing. I hope it does!

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joouha a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use chafa extensively, and it really is the best tool for terminal graphics in my opinion.

I use it as a fallback option for terminals without proper terminal graphics support in my TUI Jupyter client, euporie.

There are Python bindings available: https://github.com/GuardKenzie/chafa.py

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wonger_ a day ago | parent | next [-]

And JS bindings: https://github.com/hectorm/chafa-wasm

And I'm half-working on Rust bindings...

	▲	hectorm 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Author of the JS bindings here. I also have a browser demo: https://ansi-o-matic.molinero.dev

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Abishek_Muthian 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have you tried Charmbracelet's bubble tea - https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

	▲	nairadithya 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		BubbleTea is great, but it doesn't have support for Kitty Graphics. https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea/issues/163

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tasuki 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> and it really is the best tool for terminal graphics in my opinion

Not sixel or kitty graphics?

	▲	mmulet 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		One of the really cool things about chafa is that it has both sixel and kitty graphic renderers! (and iterm2 images as well) So you can output kitty if the terminal supports it, but fall back to ascii if it doesn’t.
	▲	hecanjog 20 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		What interests me about it is the unicode mosaic output format that looks higher quality than the usual upper half block or braille character approaches without needing to support a special protocol.
	▲	robot-wrangler 20 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Setting aside the usual compatibility issues with those things.. neither are available from your buildbot. Also while Jupyter does supports images other notebooking ecosystems may not, and anyway you need a file whereas chafa can work with streams.

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lawlessone 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

i'm curious do you work entirely with a terminal and no desktop?

Chafa looks cool, i'd feel cool using it when i use a terminal but if really wanted to see an image id just open it in a image viewer.

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atulvi 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why can't we have proper graphics on terminal? years ago I remember being able to use graphics.h to draw on MS-DOS terminal and print letters on it (text mode).

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ilaksh 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most popular terminals now have support for `kitty` graphics protocol which can smoothly and efficiently render raster images. So chafa is a way to get some backwards compatibility for some types of applications that want to show images but may not support that.

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d-lisp 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did you try notcurses ? [0]

[0] https://notcurses.com/

	▲	aragilar 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		notcurses is probably the best option for getting the best you can out of a random terminal (see https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/TERMIN... which details the status of most terminals people use), but the main thing is to choose a decent terminal that meets your needs. I personally use xterm (after using various other terminals, both "modern" and VTE-based), as I'm on Linux, and I need to connect to various devices (e.g. networking gear) where I need a reliable terminal that handles whatever those devices throw at it. The graphical mechanisms that work for me therefore are sixel and tektronic.

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aragilar 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are multiple graphics mechanisms on terminals (both real, and the virtual ones that have replaced them), the issue is which ones your terminal supports (probably none, given most terminal/libraries are bad at supporting features that have been around since the 80s), and which libraries you are using to draw them.

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nottorp 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Does any of those graphics mechanisms work over ssh?

	▲	aragilar 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, any of the inline ones should work.

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mmulet 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use chafa in term.everything[0], and I have nothing but good things to say about it! hpjansson is a great maintainer too, if anything even seems like it's wrong with chafa he will chime in with a fix or a suggestion[1] (I'm not the only one he does this with too [2][3]). I would definitely recommend this lib for anyone doing terminal graphics.

[0]https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything

[1]https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/issues/5

[2]https://lobste.rs/s/qh6lil/chafa_terminal_graphics_for_21st_...

[3]https://github.com/wong-justin/vic/issues/1#issue-2586904982

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n0um3n4 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

qué chafa!! all jokes aside, this provides infinite posibilities for my obsession with text-based apps/CLI.

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anthk 7 hours ago | parent [-]

For HNers, 'chafa' in Argentinian/Chilean Spanish (and a few more) means tacky, crude, ripoff, low quality.

	▲	hpjansson 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		'tis true.

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cherrycreek00 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been trying for like three hours to get this to show in-line images with w3m. Anyone got a config with that working?

	▲	shiomiru 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		w3m doesn't support chafa for inline image display. (You can set a custom w3mimgdisplay command, but it has to speak the same protocol as w3mimgdisplay. If you're feeling adventurous, you can try modifying https://github.com/uobikiemukot/sdump/tree/master/yaimg-sixe....)

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gnabgib 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Previously in 2022 (97 points, 31 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32797681

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carterschonwald 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you want some hilarious insanity: t try explaining ascii/terminal rendering to a text llm and see how it struggles

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duffyjp 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I threw together a utility for this with just the half character in 2018, I don't even remember why.

https://rubygems.org/gems/barf

The name does imply the image quality, fyi.

My solution is also multithreaded, in Ruby. :D

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XorNot 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Discovered this recently when I wanted to set my perfect retro feeling company logo onto the MOTD of some hardware so we'd have it on the serial port.