I use chafa in term.everything[0], and I have nothing but good things to say about it! hpjansson is a great maintainer too, if anything even seems like it's wrong with chafa he will chime in with a fix or a suggestion[1] (I'm not the only one he does this with too [2][3]). I would definitely recommend this lib for anyone doing terminal graphics.
One of the really cool things about chafa is that it has both sixel and kitty graphic renderers! (and iterm2 images as well) So you can output kitty if the terminal supports it, but fall back to ascii if it doesn’t.
I use alpine for this [1] reason, but I will admit that this is a premature-optimization. I haven’t actually ran into the problem myself.
——
Your code is great, I do basically the same thing (great minds think alike!). The only thing I want to add is that cgo supports pkg-config directly [2] via
// #cgo pkg-config: $lib
So you don’t have to pass in linker flags manually. It’s incredibly convenient.
It works so far! No major gotchas that I know of yet. From the perspective of the apps, they are just talking to a normal Wayland compositor, so everything works as expected.
Just try it for your workflow, and if you run into any problems just open an issue and I’ll fix it.
I ran into this issue when porting term.everything[0] from typescript to go. I had some c library dependencies that I did need to link, so I had to use cgo.
My solution was to do the build process on alpine linux[1] and use static linking[2]. This way it statically links musl libc, which is much friendlier with static linking than glibc.
Now, I have a static binary that runs in alpine, Debian, and even bare containers.
Since I have made the change, I have not had anyone open any issues saying they had problems running it on their machines. (Unlike when I was using AppImages, which caused much more trouble than I expected)
This is exceptionally cool!
It looks like this post isn’t getting much love though. I’ll see if I can get this post added to the second chance pool[1] and get it added to the front page!
This looks useful! A lot of the time, I open a Space to work on a project and I want all my folders arranged in a certain way. Until now, I’ve been using Shortcuts, but it would be nice if Finder just remembered where everything should go.
Awww, thanks for your kind words. Tell you what: should the fates align and we ever meet at a tech conference or hackathon, etc, I’ll do what I can so that you leave with some Gwerm-flavored memorabilia.
That’s right, it will still be pixelfied text. We could run ocr on the images then convert to text, but that’s an entirely new can of worms. Make a feature request issue on GitHub if you’re interested,
Depends on what resolution your terminal is set to. (Not the resolution of the GUI app you use, just the resolution you display it). At low resolution (640x480) it’s pretty performant, but at 4K I can hear my fans going full blast.
But really, in the last 24 hours term.everything has accumulated 1500 stars, 600 upvotes on HN, 185 upvotes on lobsters (the highest upvoted `show` tag of all time), but despite all of that, you, my friend, are the first to ask about Gwerm.
That means you win the secret prize! A custom Gwerm T-shirt! I’ll send the details to the Gmail you have linked to your account.
[0]https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything
[1]https://github.com/mmulet/term.everything/issues/5
[2]https://lobste.rs/s/qh6lil/chafa_terminal_graphics_for_21st_...
[3]https://github.com/wong-justin/vic/issues/1#issue-2586904982