And yeah, there are sixels and native rendering of graphics in terminals, but I still find this handy if I'm a couple of tmux sessions deep on a remote server and I need to figure out which graphic is which.
I guess it'll take a while for that to propagate. I wonder how well it works with nested tmux sessions and multiple servers. Also I do have the issue with terminals support. Regrettably the assigned work computer is still Windows, and I've been using putty there. If you know of a good sixel terminal for windows..
Anyway, Chafa's results are darn good IMO. The images in the gallery don't I feel showcase how well it matches against organic forms. And it handles a wide variety of images. SVG etc.
Even when I have access to pixels, I find on slow connections Chafa can be a decent form of compression :) For example, I was using the ffmpeg patch to play a video remotely to figure out what it was and while I could have relayed it with ssh -YC , Chafa was simply a lot more performant due to it being a lossy transformation. Kinda like playing the video in a VNC session with jpeg loss cranked up to max, but without the need to fire that up.
It also has some basic ffmpeg support.
And yeah, there are sixels and native rendering of graphics in terminals, but I still find this handy if I'm a couple of tmux sessions deep on a remote server and I need to figure out which graphic is which.