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hackerb9 / lsix

Like "ls", but for images. Shows thumbnails in terminal using sixel graphics.
GNU General Public License v3.0
3.99k stars 129 forks source link

Suggestion: Check for dependencies and alert user to install them. #9

Closed Eirikur closed 5 years ago

Eirikur commented 5 years ago

I had to install webp, but imagemagic needs to be there, of course, and I had that. It still doesn't work on the default terminal on Linux Mint Cinnamon, showing some escape sequences and errors. I'm entering this because I think it would be a good idea to check for the binaries this depends on.

hackerb9 commented 5 years ago

I think checking to make sure that the user's terminal can handle sixel graphics is an excellent idea. Is that what you meant by "binaries"? If so, that's a very good suggestion.

hackerb9 commented 5 years ago

Can you please try the latest release (1.6.2). It should now give an error message if your terminal cannot handle SIXEL graphics. Thanks.

Eirikur commented 5 years ago

Works like a charm. It detects Gnome Terminal 3.28.1 as not supporting sixels. What I actually meant, though, was to check for the presence on the filesystem of the utility programs that you use in the script. Imagemagic was on my machine (but checking for it would be good) but webp was not, which resulted in errors that the user probably couldn't deal with unless they were very technical. I worked with the people who invented sixels, back in the day.

hackerb9 commented 5 years ago

I see what you're saying about webp. I don't have a lot of webp files yet, so I hadn't noticed ImageMagick was punting to an external program to convert them. I presume future versions of ImageMagick will link to a webp library and that will fix the problem with mysterious technical errors. (lsix already checks for the existence of ImageMagick's montage and complains if it is not installed, by the way).

That's neat that you worked with the SIXEL inventors. Do you remember their names? I'm pretty sure they're not listed in the DEC documentation. They were smart cookies and I love that they had the foresight to allow color specification as HSL.