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% cha-image(5) | Image support in Chawan
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# Inline images
On terminals that support images, Chawan can display various bit-mapped
image formats.
## Enabling images
There are actually two switches for images in the config:
* buffer.images: this enables downloading images, *even if they cannot
be displayed*.
* display.image-mode: sets the inline image display method. Defaults to
"auto", but may also be set to "sixel" or "kitty" manually.
In most cases, all you need to do is to set "buffer.images" to true;
with the default image-mode, Chawan will find the best image display
method supported by your terminal.
If your terminal does not tell Chawan that it can display sixels, you may also
have to set "display.image-mode" appropriately. See below for further
discussion of sixel configuration.
## Output formats
Supported output formats are:
* The DEC Sixel format
* The Kitty terminal graphics protocol
The former is supported because it's ubiquitiously adopted; the latter
because it is technically superior to all existing alternatives.
Support for other protocols (iTerm, MLTerm, etc.) is not planned. (To my
knowledge, all image-capable terminals support at least one of the
above two anyways.)
Support for hacks such as w3mimgdisplay, ueberzug, etc. is not planned.
### Sixel
Sixel is the most widely supported image format. See <https://arewesixelyet.com>
to find a terminal that supports it.
Known quirks and implementation details:
* XTerm needs extensive configuration for ideal sixel support. In particular,
you will want to set the "decTerminalID", "numColorRegisters",
and "maxGraphicSize" attributes. See `man xterm` for details.
* We assume private color registers are supported. On terminals where they
aren't (e.g. SyncTERM or hardware terminals), colors will get messed up with
multiple images on screen.
* We send XTSMGRAPHICS for retrieving the number of color registers; on failure,
we fall back to 256. You can override color register count using the
`display.sixel-colors` configuration value.
* For the most efficient sixel display, you will want a cell height that
is a multiple of 6. Otherwise, the images will have to be re-coded several
times on scroll.
* Normally, Sixel encoding runs in two passes. On slow computers, you can try
setting `display.sixel-colors = 2`, which will skip the first pass.
* Transparency is currently not supported; you will get strange results with
transparent images.
### Kitty
On terminals that support it, Kitty's protocol is preferred over
Sixel. Its main benefit is that images do not have to be sent again
every time they move on the screen (i.e. on scroll), but the initial
transfer should also be faster (because PNG's compression tends to
outperform Sixel's RLE).
Unlike Sixel, the Kitty protocol fully supports transparency.
## Input formats
Currently, the supported input formats are:
* BMP, PNG, JPEG, GIF (through stb_image)
* WebP (through JebP)
More formats may be added in the future, provided there exists a
reasonably small implementation, preferably in the public domain. (I do
not want to depend on external image decoding libraries, but something
like stbi is OK to vendor.)
### Codec module system
All image codec implementations are specified by the URL scheme
"img-codec+name:", where "name" is the MIME subtype. e.g. for image/png,
it is "img-codec+png:". (This indeed means that only "image" MIME types
can be used.)
Like all schemes, these are defined (and overridable) in the
urimethodmap file, and are implemented as local CGI programs. These
programs take an encoded image on stdin, and dump the decoded RGBA data
to stdout - when encoding, vice versa.
This means that it is possible for users to define image decoders for
their preferred formats, or even override the built-in ones. (If you
actually end up doing this for some reason, please shoot me a mail so I
can add it to the bonus directory.)
A codec can have one of, or both, "decode" and "encode" instructions;
these are set in the path name. So "img-codec+png:decode" is called for
decoding PNGs, and "img-codec+png:encode" for encoding them.
Headers are used for transferring metadata (like image dimensions), both
from the browser (input) and to the browser (output). Detailed
description of the decoder & encoder interfaces follows.
#### decoding
When the path equals "decode", a codec CGI script must take a binary
stream of an encoded image on its standard input and print the
equivalent binary stream of big-endian 8-bit (per component) RGBA values
to stdout.
Input headers:
* Cha-Image-Info-Only: 1
This tells the image decoder to only send image metadata (i.e. size).
Technically, the decoder is free to actually decode the image too, but
the browser will ignore any output after headers.
Output headers:
* Cha-Image-Dimensions: {width}x{height}
The size of the decoded image.
The dimension format is such that e.g. for 123x456, 123 is width and 456
is height.
#### encoding
When the path equals "encode", a codec CGI script must take a binary
stream of big-endian 8-bit (per component) RGBA values on its standard
input and print the equivalent encoded image to its standard output.
Input headers:
* Cha-Image-Dimensions: {width}x{height}
Specifies the dimensions of the input RGBA image. This means that
{width} * {height} * 4 == {size of data received on stdin}.
The format is the same as above; in fact, the design is such that you
could directly pipe the output of decode to encode (and vice versa).
* Cha-Image-Quality: {number}
The requested encoding quality, ranging from 1 to 100 inclusive
(i.e. 1..100). It is up to the encoder to interpret this number.
(The stb_image JPEG encoder uses this.)
Output headers:
Currently, no output headers are defined for encoders.
### Skipping copies with mmap
The naive implementation of the above system would have to copy the
output at least twice when an image is resized. To skip these copies,
stdin and/or stdout is (currently) a file in the tmp directory for:
* decode stdin, when the image is already downloaded
* decode stdout, always
* encode stdin, always
This makes it possible to mmap(2) stdin/stdout instead of streaming
through them with read(2) and write(2). When doing this, mind the
following:
* When reading, you must check your initial position in the file with
lseek(2).
* When writing, your headers are part of the output. At the very least,
you must place a newline at the file's beginning.
* This *is* an implementation detail, and might change at any time in
the future (e.g. if we add a "no cache files" mode). Always check
for S_ISREG to ensure that you are actually dealing with a file.