// the find
jart/hiptext
Turn images into text better than caca/aalib
hiptext renders images and videos in the terminal using ANSI color codes, Unicode half-blocks, and SIXEL — producing noticeably better output than aalib or libcaca by exploiting xterm256 palettes more aggressively. It's a novelty tool for developers who want to impress people in talks or README screenshots, not something you'd ship in production.
The MacTerm mode is genuinely clever: it exploits the fact that Terminal.app's xterm256 palette uses slightly different colors for foreground and background, which lets it squeeze ~512 effective colors out of a 256-color terminal via Unicode half-blocks. SIXEL support is a real differentiator — most terminal image tools ignore it. The CSS/X11 color parsing via Ragel is a nice touch that makes background color matching actually work. Video playback via libav is functional and not something most similar tools bother with.
Dead since 2014 in all but name — the last meaningful commit was over a decade ago, libavformat/libavcodec APIs have broken compatibility multiple times since, and the bundled gtest is ancient. The build system is autotools, which means you're in for a fight on any modern Linux distro with updated library headers. No CMake, no pkg-config fallbacks that actually work, and the Travis CI badge is broken because travis-ci.org shut down. Anyone trying to build this today will almost certainly need to patch the ffmpeg call sites by hand.