Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century (hpjansson.org)

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

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

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.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.