It’s worse than that, there’s other shells that support their own ANSI escape sequence for transferring base64 encoded images: kitty (not to be confused with KiTTY - the PuTTY fork) and Terminology (of enlightenment DE) each have their own “standard” and they differ from iTerm2’s. They all have their own CLI tools too.
Then there is sixel - which solved a problem back when TTYs were VDUs but aren’t really suitable for a modern era where it’s all terminal emulators running on (U)HD displays. I don’t think sixel support is all that widespread though but happy to be corrected there.
What we really need is one CLI tool to rule them all. One tool that will detect the shell you’re using and default to the best escape sequence for that shell; falling back to ASCII art when all else fails.
This is something I’ve been actively working on in some of my spare time but it’s not ready for public consumption, yet....
Yeah I did say “terminal emulators” else where in that comment. Not really sure why I said “shells” in the first line. Must have been having a senior moment....
Sidenote: terminology does not transfer base64 images, but gives an URL (usually a local file, but it could work with http), so that does not work over ssh; but it's faster (no copy/encode/decode).
Then there is sixel - which solved a problem back when TTYs were VDUs but aren’t really suitable for a modern era where it’s all terminal emulators running on (U)HD displays. I don’t think sixel support is all that widespread though but happy to be corrected there.
What we really need is one CLI tool to rule them all. One tool that will detect the shell you’re using and default to the best escape sequence for that shell; falling back to ASCII art when all else fails.
This is something I’ve been actively working on in some of my spare time but it’s not ready for public consumption, yet....