Top all-time · #2813
H. P. Jansson
Personal blog · hpjansson.org/blagprogrammingsystems
H. P. Jansson writes Et tu, Cthulhu, a personal blog at hpjansson.org about programming and systems. Since 2018, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times, most often “Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (24) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters mostly link the Chafa project page for rendering images as Unicode/ASCII art in terminals, plus blog posts on hash table benchmarks and GNOME contributor data. Few comments judge the writing directly.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 24 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Personal blag of H. P. Jansson: Free Software, Open Source mostly.
Most-linked posts?
- Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century12 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2018-04-26
- On the Graying of Gnome5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-12-16
- A hash table re-hash3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-07-25
- Chafa 1.8: Terminal graphics with a side of everything2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-09-16
- Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 22 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-16
- /chafa/gallery/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-16
What Hacker News says?
How do you judge performance of a terminal ? I know graphics in the terminal is an edge case and all but when I'm running a chafa [0] application Windows terminal on Windows is about 1000x slower than alacritty on mac, I run into issues where if I hold down a key all the key events get queued up as if the graphics thread is blocking the applications ability to react to key events, so I just have to baby it and hit o…
Comment linking /chafa/
on “iTerm2 critical security release”Submitted Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2 as a story · 428 points
HN discussionIs GNOME as a community project? My reading of https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... is that it is driven largely by Red Hat and to some degree other companies. To your general point (why attack the project): GNOME has a reputation (IMO deserved) for aggressively not caring about the opinions of users or outside projects (ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795901 ). So at some point…
Comment linking /blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnome/
on “Gnome 40”Submitted Chafa: Terminal Graphics for the 21st Century as a story · 227 points
HN discussionLooks good! I've seen a few such libraries. My favorite is chafa: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/
Comment linking /chafa/
on “lsix: Like "ls", but for images”Submitted On the Graying of Gnome as a story · 139 points
HN discussionAre you sure? https://hpjansson.org/chafa/
Comment linking /chafa/
on “Bubble Tea: fun, functional and stateful way to build terminal apps”Submitted Chafa 1.8: Terminal graphics with a side of everything as a story · 137 points
HN discussionNext level: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/ which finds unicode symbols that approximate the content best.
Comment linking /chafa/
on “imgcat: higher resolution”Submitted Gnome Turns 25 as a story · 133 points
HN discussionFun fact, this project helped the author get a job: https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl/issues/162#issuecomment-1... Carbonyl is surprisingly performant and usable, especially with --zoom=300 --bitmap At lower resolutions, it would be nice to render images using a "subpixel" terminal rendering library like chafa ( https://hpjansson.org/chafa/ ), or maybe sixels/kitty image protocol.
Comment linking /chafa/
on “Forking Chrome to render in a terminal (2023)”Submitted Show HN: The worst ANSI renderer, except for all the others as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI don't know if you'd call him a theorist, but I think this gentleman maintains GHashTable and I found his posts comparing/benchmarking widely used hash tables really informative and entertaining: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2018/07/24/a-hash-table-re-hash/
Comment linking /blag/2018/07/24/a-hash-table-re-hash/
on “Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?”Submitted A hash table re-hash as a story · 20 points
HN discussionMaybe use the unicode rendering engine from chafa to improve the output quality: https://hpjansson.org/chafa/ https://github.com/hpjansson/chafa
Comment linking /chafa/
on “MapSCII: World map renderer for your console”Submitted On the Graying of Gnome as a story · 5 points
HN discussionChafa is an open source project that lets you visualize images on the command-line by converting them to Unicode characters ("ASCII art") with colours. It's available in many Linux distros, as well as Homebrew for macOS. What a find! $ chafa example_image.jpg https://hpjansson.org/chafa/
Comment linking /chafa/
on “Chafa 1.8: Terminal graphics with a side of everything”Submitted Balance of Power: A rematch served cold as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIMO the best results out there are with chafa right now. https://hpjansson.org/chafa/gallery/ It also has some basic ffmpeg support. And yeah, there are sixels and native rendering of graphics in terminals, but I still find this handy if I'm a couple of tmux sessions deep on a remote server and I need to figure out which graphic is which.
Comment linking /chafa/gallery/
on “Show HN: a Rust based CLI tool 'imgcatr' for displaying images”Submitted On the Graying of Gnome as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> I don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today. I don't think we'll reach any real agreements either, but I also don't think it's all that subjective. We could say my perspective is skewe…
Comment linking /blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom
on “PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat”Submitted Chafa 1.6.0: Wider as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today. That being said there is a bit of hard data, this post nicely shows gnome contributions over time, as less and less non-redhat developer cont…
Comment linking /blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnome/
on “PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat”Submitted Chafa: Pictures to Text as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat's an interesting idea. The closest thing I can think of is using an extended box-drawing font: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2024/01/18/chafa-1-14-all-singing... . That doesn't solve the two-colors-per-cell challenge. But it makes for some very realistic terminal images. For higher fidelity rendering, I think the next best option is supporting image protocols like sixels or Kitty inline raster images. I'm not sure…
Comment linking /blag/2024/01/18/chafa-1-14-all-singing-all-dancing/
on “State of the Terminal”Submitted Battle of the Bilerps: Image Scaling on the CPU as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBy the same author, the 1FB00 unicode block: https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1FB00.pdf I think it's even more interesting, as it will improve the textual rendition of graphics for people who can't use sixels. See also Chafa https://hpjansson.org/blag/2021/09/16/chafa-1-8-terminal-gra... for more details, and sixel-tmux https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-tmux to transform sixels into unicode if your terminal doesn't sup…
Comment linking /blag/2021/09/16/chafa-1-8-terminal-graphics-with-a-side-of-everything/
on “0xA000 Font Family – A tile mastered font-family”Submitted A hash table re-hash as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAlmost none of those are feature requests. I mean yes, the gnome developers do write code, and that code does get merged in. I don't understand what you're trying to prove by pointing that out. As you can see Gnome is mostly a redhat project these days: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... It's not surprising that things get merged when they come from redhat-affiliated developers.
Comment linking /blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnome/
on “Some Unlikely 2021 Predictions”Submitted Chafa: High-quality picture to text for terminal emulators as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
