Which anyone who knows how to actually use a terminal should have upgraded to years ago anyway, mind you.
Are Sixel images actually used very often these days? Is support in Windows Console a big deal, or just lots of fun?
Yes, if that dot matrix printer could then also select any color you like. Sixels can do full color images.
> Are Sixel images actually used very often these days?
No, but support and use of them is increasing, not decreasing as one might expect.
There aren't a lot of "legitimate" use cases for now, I believe, but it's neat, and IMO an image mode extension for tty kind of makes it whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semigraphics
but I've fallen out of the habit because it's a hassle to get them to display right all of the time on the web.
One of my favorite terminals of all times were the DEC ReGIS terminals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS
which supported a set of commands similar to the drawing commands in BASIC back in the day but supported more and better colors than home computers at the time and could also freely mix graphics and text. Since the PDP-11 supported BASIC you could write graphical programs in BASIC that would draw on the terminal using the right character sequences.
Either way, I agree that kitty's protocol should become a versioned standard, but I also don't think that people will be very quick to change it at this point.
Maybe someone has an independent patch that can be applied?
And I just type term when I hit the windows key anyway so default mostly doesn't matter for me, but good to know.