VT330/VT340 Sixel Graphics
Funny thing, as popular as sixels are now, they were pretty useless back in the day. It would take ages for a picture to appear on a VT terminal with those slow serial speeds (VT320 doing 19200 baud max! - not sure about the 330&#x2F;340). Especially with colour. I&#x27;m pretty sure the later ones (I have a VT520 myself) didn&#x27;t even have it anymore!<p>I know word perfect for Unix used it for the print preview but I don&#x27;t know any other app from those days that used them at all. The same with the double width or height fonts the VT series offers. I&#x27;ve only ever seen them working when running vttest. They could be very useful, but in practice I&#x27;ve never seen them actually used for something other than testing.<p>These days with pretty much unlimited speed sixels actually become useful. But they don&#x27;t support full 24 bit colour so another technique is probably better for today&#x27;s needs. For example it would be great to be able to define a terminal region and send images and video to it with full hardware acceleration and compression (H.264 or similar). I think there&#x27;s still a good usecase for terminals, but holding on to sixel feels a bit too much of a kludge to me. If they were super abundant and popular, sure. But they never actually were.<p>I think this is also why kitty chose to build a custom protocol instead of implementing sixel.