Display graphical images in terminal

[JekRock]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

It would be nice to have the ability to display graphical images in the terminal by using the API provided by the Windows Terminal. Maybe something similar to https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/icat.html or https://www.iterm2.com/documentation-images.html

[zadjii-msft]

So we've already got #448 for display images with sixel graphics, though maybe this issue would make sense to leave open for supporting other binary image formats in the Terminal. Especially for something like gifs, which I don't think sixel is necessarily well suited for.

[DHowett-MSFT]

I'm taking triage off this. It needs a spec, and we need to make sure that we follow the prevailing standards if we're ever going to do this.

[DHowett-MSFT]

Comments from #4544.

from @zyy1998

Display images in terminal

I'm trying to use WSL to substitute some functions on windows, it performed well in some text-only functions. But I'm also want to use ranger ( a linux terminal file explorer ) to replace totalcommander which I often used or even windows file explorer, ranger satisfies my content in many occasions but for image preview.

w3m is a terminal web browser that could be used to display images in terminal, and it can also be used by ranger. However, w3m didn't work on this terminal.

There are many other terminals like iTerm2、urxvt and alacritty could display images. As a terminal under windows, I think it's more necessary to support this feature.

Proposed technical implementation details

I don't know how does w3m works, but I have noticed that the terminal could be changed the background pictures, so if you want to render some images, you can just change the specific area of the background of the terminal. Actually it's how urxvt handled it.

Of course, you don't have to support w3m, just do something that could display images correctly and the method could be called by other apps like ranger, that's all what I need.

Thanks! ( And pardon for my poor English😁 )

You can find more information here: https://github.com/ranger/ranger/wiki/Image-Previews

from @akho

w3m and überzug both rely on x11 to draw an image in a subwindow. It is highly unlikely that either of the two can be made to work in Terminal without also modifying the tools themselves.

Having some way to draw images in terminal would be very nice though. Kitty, for example, implements its own thing (icat), and integrates well with ranger. Would be lovely to have that in Terminal.

Sixel or whatever iTerm2 does are also nice, I think Sixel support is in the pipeline? Not supported by ranger yet, though.

[remkop]

This discussion between the authors of various terminal emulators may be relevant: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/issues/12

It looks like MinTTY went ahead and implemented iTerm2 escape sequences so perhaps this is worth considering as a de facto standard.

[egmontkob]

See also https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/issues/26.

[j4james]

See also https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/terminal-wg/specifications/-/issues/26.

https://xkcd.com/927/

[dotnetCarpenter]

I tried to use feh in terminal but I needed X11 running. So I tried both VcXsrv Windows X Server and MobaXterm Home Edition. In both cases, I need to forward to X11 and open Windows firewall TCP port 6000 as described on StackOverflow.

But both also had a lot more than I need or want. And both will only display images in their own terminal. I want to use Microsoft terminal and I want images to look like the mockup at wslutiliti.es (using feh).

I googled how to run X11 server in MS terminal and found this issue... I hope it's feasible. 🤷

[metawrap-dev]

It would be fantastic if I could just pipe out HTML5 from my console app and have it display on the terminal.

How about that?

[zadjii-msft]

@metawrap-dev How would you propose that would actually work? How would you specify a size for the HTML content to take up within the terminal buffer? How would you deal with scenarios like ssh, where the end terminal might be on another machine entirely, or something like tmux where the end terminal isn't actually a terminal with a physical size in pixels, only in characters?

How would you suppose the terminal actually parse and render the HTML content? A WebView? Embed en entire electron instance? Is JS supported as well, or just HTML?

There's a lot more questions in that suggestion than there are for just "display images", so maybe that discussion warrants its own thread.

[sintaxx]

has there been any progress on displaying images in WSL2's terminal ?

[DHowett]

no. If you'd like updates, click on the subscribe button to the right. As long as this issue is open and there have been no comments indicating progress, you can reasonably expect that there hasn't been any progress.

[JekRock]

Here is an interesting project about rendering videos in a terminal https://github.com/ghaiklor/terminal-canvas

[dinhanhx]

Here is the closest thing I found https://github.com/nabijaczleweli/termimage

[MuizU]

Has anyone had any success using ueberzug?

[dinhanhx]

Has anyone had any success using ueberzug?

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/4544#issuecomment-626187986

[bushnerd]

Has anyone had any success using ueberzug?

I test it, it did not work.

[zacknorman]

Just wanted to chime in as I'm excited for this... specifically being able to properly run neofetch with w3m wallpaper support...

If it's any help, I think the escape sequence in iTerm2 would be the best case. I've always used that on MacOS and it's exceptional. Another one worth looking into might be tycat from the terminology terminal in enlightenment.

Looking forward to seeing this happen - and honestly - I'd love to help out with it.

[hhoeflin]

Here another very good program for converting images to something that can be displayed in terminal with a lot of different options.

https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa

[bragmore]

why is there no support for this yet?

[christianparpart]

why is there no support for this yet?

Because it's complicated.

Because ConPTY needs to support that (e.g. via VT passthrough) first before any other terminal on windows can display images generically.

Best chances are to get it via #1173 .

[danielbisar]

A workaround is using kitty terminal on Windows 11 without running vcxsrv. Performance of the terminal is a bit slower than Windows Terminal on my machine but kittys icat is works

https://github.com/danielbisar/settings/blob/main/guides/kitty-on-windows-with-wsl2.md

[koszeggy]

Apart from some well-supported future API for this, it would be nice if at least the legacy solutions were not broken. It has been working since Windows XP until Windows 10 and even ConEmu emulates this behavior. And a sort of popular console apps such as Far Manager could utilize it in some clever ways:

Unfortunately this no longer works with Windows 11 Terminal. I don't know what's missing to make it work again because GetConsoleWindow still returns the console handle as a Win32 HWND and even the Graphics::FromHWND method returns a seemingly valid instance, it's just its VisibleClipBounds is always an empty rectangle.

[odell0111]

The Python package, image-in-terminal, performs well by replacing every two pixels of an image with the character ▀ (Upper Half Block). This makes it most suitable for displaying low-resolution images. While images with higher resolutions can also be displayed in the terminal, performance may decrease and the terminal’s contents will need to be zoomed out to view the images. This package served my small project well, and it might also be useful for others until the Windows Terminal implements support for displaying images

[Shailosingh]

Hey! I recently have been using Windows Terminal to SSH into a Linux VM and found out that there is functionality within neofetch to change the ASCII image to a real image (I know I'm late). However, it wasn't working on my Windows Terminal so I googled and found this issue page.

I notice that it is very old so I have some questions:

1. Is this still a feature being considered? Does the team consider rendering images within the Terminal a priority?
2. I am pretty sure most people would want this for WSL but, if this feature got finished, is there a chance it would work when Linux is open via SSH (like in my case)?

[lhecker]

Yes, to both questions. An initial implementation would almost certainly implement sixels first, since we already have a basic sixel parser (and related code) and it's the most basic of format. And sixels work over SSH. (Edit: And the linked formats both support SSH as well.)

[Shailosingh]

Yes, to both questions. An initial implementation would almost certainly implement sixels first, since we already have a basic sixel parser (and related code) and it's the most basic of format. And sixels work over SSH. (Edit: And the linked formats both support SSH as well.)

Oh wow, that's great! Thanks for the update!

[iSeiryu]

why is there no support for this yet?

Because it's complicated.

Because ConPTY needs to support that (e.g. via VT passthrough) first before any other terminal on windows can display images generically.

Best chances are to get it via #1173 .

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1173#issuecomment-1600968653 Windows Terminal Preview has a hidden setting for this now:

"experimental.connection.passthroughMode": true,