the.com/terminal graphics
pictures drawn with text, because your terminal never agreed to render an actual image.
means techniques for displaying images, plots, or animations inside a text-only terminal, using characters, color codes, or protocol tricks instead of a real GUI.
from born from necessity in the era of teletypes and dumb terminals, where ASCII art and clever escape sequences were the only way to fake a picture; evolved through ANSI art, sixel in the 1980s DEC terminals, and now modern protocols like kitty and iTerm2 inline images.
sixel agesixel graphics predate most GUIs, from 1980s dec printers
block trickunicode half-blocks double a terminal's effective pixel resolution
still aliveused today for htop graphs, neofetch logos, image previews
protocol warskitty, iterm2, and sixel all render images differently