Show HN: kitty-graphics.el – Images, LaTeX and PDFs in terminal Emacs

Posted by cashmere1337 7 hours ago

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Comment by priowise 7 hours ago

Always interesting to see terminals getting closer to GUI capabilities.

Curious where you see this being most useful in practice, documentation workflows, data exploration, or something else?

Comment by cashmere1337 3 hours ago

Great question!

I actually use GUI Emacs more often than terminal Emacs. But when I'm deep in a CLI-centric workflow, deploying over SSH, running commands, maybe taking notes, it's much more convenient to stay in the terminal. And when I need to glance at an image, a screenshot or a PDF in that context, it's nice not to have to leave. I started this purely out of curiosity, just wanted to see how far the Kitty graphics protocol could go in Emacs. When I realized you could get surprisingly far with zero dependencies, I decided to build it out properly for the Emacs community rather than just for myself.

Displaying images in terminal Emacs was considered basically impossible for a long time. Whenever new users coming from other TUI editors or terminal-centric workflows asked about it, the answer was always "just use GUI Emacs". That's a valid answer, but it's nice to finally have an alternative.

Comment by cashmere1337 7 hours ago

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