I would point out that sixels[0] exist. There is a nice library, libsixel[1] for working with it, which includes bindings into many languages. If the author of sixel-tmux[2][3] is to be believed[4], the relative lack of adoption is a result of unwillingness on the part of maintainers of some popular open source terminal libraries to implement sixel support.
I can't comment on that directly, but I will say, it's pretty damn cool to see GnuPlot generating output right into one's terminal. lsix[5] is also pretty handy as well.
But yeah, I agree, I'm not a fan of all the work that has gone into "terminal graphics" that are based on unicode. It's a dead-end, as was clear to DEC even back in '87 (and that's setting aside that the VT220[6] had it's own drawing capabilities, though they were more limited). Maybe sixel isn't the best possible way of handling this, but it does have the benefit of 34 years of backwards-compatibility, and with the right software, you can already use it _now_.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
1 - https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/
2 - https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux
3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756701
4 - https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/blob/main/RANTS.md
5 - https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix
6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220
I can't comment on that directly, but I will say, it's pretty damn cool to see GnuPlot generating output right into one's terminal. lsix[5] is also pretty handy as well.
But yeah, I agree, I'm not a fan of all the work that has gone into "terminal graphics" that are based on unicode. It's a dead-end, as was clear to DEC even back in '87 (and that's setting aside that the VT220[6] had it's own drawing capabilities, though they were more limited). Maybe sixel isn't the best possible way of handling this, but it does have the benefit of 34 years of backwards-compatibility, and with the right software, you can already use it _now_.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
1 - https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/
2 - https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux
3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756701
4 - https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux/blob/main/RANTS.md
5 - https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix
6 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT220