Yeah, I think OP wrote must of what they did in genuine frustation. Saladuh's response probably comes mostly from having read this paragraph from OP's rant: "This is why I released sixel-tmux. That's also why I use Windows besides the wonderful mintty being the number 1 choice for terminal afficionados, it gives more options in general: I like that because I don't like depending on people who seem stuck in a desire to be lord-of-the-flies. Unfortunately, there seem to be quite a few in the free software world..."
Also they go on from there about how they want to encourage Linux users to jump over to Windows. Again, I think this is just frustration with their perception that there are too many control freaks in the opensource world acting as gatekeepers for important feature availabilities (the core of their rant is just that they really wish they could have done graphical plots in their default terminal when they were in school years ago).
To my reading, it sounds like someone who wanted to support free software who jumped over to Windows in disgust, not really a "Windows fanboy."
I have a few things that I can't stand and I have no problem ditching something that doesn't offer me what I want. For example, I ditched Kitty because it doesn't let me disable italic variants of monospace fonts. In a hypothetical scenario, if tmux/screen didn't exist and Kitty was the one terminal which had these features, I would be frustrated as well if the dev didn't budge from his position of not letting users disable italic fonts. Fortunately, tmux exists and Alacritty lets me disable italics.
It's pretty naive and immature to get married to the tools you're using. Unfortunately, you see this a lot in the FOSS world.
No, my 'rant' came from this section of this other rant[0], which is linked in the rant in OP's linked repo. I suppose I should have made this more obvious instead of assuming everyone would read the links provided in the whole rant (because I did indeed read the whole entire rant, and I agree with a lot of it, just not the part about windows being better than Linux and everyone who disagrees is a "millennial" seeking "geek cred", which originally misquoted in my 'rant').
If the other rant was distracting, then it too will be moved to another page.
But yes, I do believe people claiming that Linux offers the best terminal experience are either doing that for social credit and validation of their peers (in an "emperor has no clothes" way) or due to misinformation and a lack of personal experience with alternatives (in a "micro$oft only knows embrace, extend, extinguish" way)
Some do that for both reasons, and I'll let you make your own conclusion about their demographic group.
The strangest thing to me though is that the OP finished this work last year and sat on it until very recently. They explain it as "I wrote this for a client and didn't feel like sharing it." That attitude seems a bit in contrast to the purported motivation to, "Make it so people don't suffer like I did in school."
So I guess in a way OP is (sort of) seeing the light on free software here too. Don't like it? Fork it!
Hard forks rarely get traction and are almost always lost in obscurity, unless the original project itself is abandoned. tmux isn't abandoned so I doubt this fork will end up being used by more than a handful of people.
EDIT: Yup, as suspected, the author doesn't intend to keep his fork updated with upstream and I don't blame him for that. This essentially makes this fork a proof of concept, nothing more. Unless it gets merged in tmux itself, people might as well forget that this fork exists.
But I try to keep my personal opinions separate, which is why my rants are on a separate page.
Still, you nailed it: sixel-tmux was made to try to help correct the direction that has been taken, with 6 years wasted.
I believe it's unfair that Linux users have fewer options than us Windows users, due to some people thinking sixel is "uncool".
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Publishing this fork was a last resort move, for the exact reasons you stated: forks are often lost in obscurity.
However, the situation seems to be changing: check the discussion in: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/pull/1 and you'll see there may be some light at the end of the tunnel!
A compile time flag is not ideal, but if at least derasterize can be added by default, so that every tmux user can have some kind of graphics in the terminal, even if said graphics are not sixels but derasterized, that would be "good enough" to me.
I'm just a random spectator but perhaps your efforts might've been better spent on an independent terminal project (like Alacritty, for example) rather than trying to get features merged upstream in a GNOME project.
> However, the situation seems to be changing: check the discussion in: https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/pull/1 and you'll see there may be some light at the end of the tunnel!
Yeah, I read the entire conversation and if sixel support lands in tmux upstream, it would indeed be good news.
>> In 2012, we submitted a tiny patch exposing the APIs needed for the keyboard text selection, hints mode and other features. Despite support from multiple other projects, the patch was rejected. It's now almost a decade later and no progress has been made. There is no implementation of these kinds of features in VTE and it's unlikely they'll be provided either internally or as flexible APIs. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their hostility towards other projects using VTE as a library. GTK and most of the GNOME project are much of the same. Avoid them and don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use.
This is exactly why sixel-tmux exists as a separate entity!
> Yeah, I read the entire conversation and if sixel support lands in tmux upstream, it would indeed be good news.
I'll keep my fingers crossed, but right now, there seems to be a lot of good will. I will do everything I can.
Here you mention some other things unrelated to terminals, and I was mostly addressing those. It seems to me you want a specific type of experience on Linux, but you can't get that, so therefore dismiss the merits of Linux. I think a lot of your impressions on Linux come from using an X11 based setup instead of Wayland. Completely different beasts, and I think a lot of your grievances would be solved by the latter.
For me, I cannot go back to Windows, ethical reasons aside: Sway on Wayland is perfect for me, and it's what I want out of my computing experience.
I actually agree with a lot that is written in those rants, particularly the VTE and gnome terminal situation. It's just your comments on windows vs linux came across as very personal imo, so I suppose I have retorted here with also a somewhat personal rant.
Also, I don't think either platform has many good terminal choices. Besides mintty, I don't think there are that many good (platform exclusive) terminal emulators on Windows. And on Linux, Foot is one of the few that meets my criteria, including top tier Sixel support (though Wezterm meets my criteria too if it wasn't so slow, hopefully it gets faster). But, for example, I could never really like mintty if I was forced to use Windows, because it lacks features I want.
What I'm trying to say: different needs, different use cases, different tastes. Sorry that my original rant came off so negatively to you and that I wasn't able to convey this point I was trying to make.
Uh, no apologies needed, as I don't think such issues really matters (especially online where everyone can be a dog, woof woof!). And it's ok to call out potential prejudice if you think some opinions are unfair.
However, I think my expectations and opinions on terminals are quite fair, and that most people would enjoy an equivalent of mintty if there was one on Linux: it has been polished by years of adding small functionalities that adds up to make a whole that's greater than the sum of the parts.
You seem to generally agree with my takes, so I'm curious, what is lacking in mintty for your own uses? Personally, the only missing functionality that I sometimes regret is tab support.
As for platform exclusives, Windows Terminal has great tab support and is right now the best terminal for someone who doesn't need sixels: the ability to configure different shells ("profiles") is by itself quite admirable. The attention to details (SGR1) and configurability of said details seals the deal: different colors for different tabs of different profiles, so you don't mix your remote sessions!
As for Wayland, I can't say. I may have tried it for 10 minutes or 1 hour then found limitations, and decided it may not give the best argument in favor of Linux so I'd rather skip it. I will try Linux again in 2022, and I'll spend time with foot since everyone seem to love it, so I'll give another try to Wayland!
Besides having a great terminal experience (as I do most of my work there), one of the silly details that matters to me the most is having a consistent white theme which both removes the perception of reflections on glossy displays in the daytime, and allows an easy dark mode if you do a screen inversion + a red shift at the night time. NegativeScreen is a gem to do that on Windows: night mode for every app as soon as you press a button!
If I can't do that on Wayland (no more xrandr) like I do on Windows, the lack of support for themes in future gnome versions worries me, as pure white themes (for eInk) and pure black themes (for OLED) are extremely rare by default.
Still, I would love to be able to use Linux, because I love ZFS, but so far the terminal experience and the UI have kept me firmly in Windows land.
I'll see how the situation evolves... if it doesn't change enough, I may do something weird, like a GPU passthrough with everything on Windows, storage on a zvol handled by Linux as the virtualizer.
Also they go on from there about how they want to encourage Linux users to jump over to Windows. Again, I think this is just frustration with their perception that there are too many control freaks in the opensource world acting as gatekeepers for important feature availabilities (the core of their rant is just that they really wish they could have done graphical plots in their default terminal when they were in school years ago).
To my reading, it sounds like someone who wanted to support free software who jumped over to Windows in disgust, not really a "Windows fanboy."