> Even with 8 GB, the difference between tycat (assuming it needs no memory at all) and VLC is then about 1% of the machine's capacity.
Maybe you don't tend to use all your machine's resources, but the way I use my machine, it's constantly at near or over 100% capacity. I'm constantly fighting against swap, no matter how much ram I have. Right now my machine is using about 113% of available ram. I'll have to flush it out and clean it up soon to prevent too much swapping. I probably wouldn't want to start vlc right now without closing something else first - if I wanted to watch a video right now I'd use something more lightweight (or something I already have loaded, like my terminal). This is a normal state of affairs for me.
> A useful baseline seems to be the actual Linux terminal. It can do 16 colors. Unfortunately, it doesn't even support emojis, though.
In what way is this "a useful baseline"? Useful for what? Why is the extremely-well-supported 256 colour set or RGB not more useful? Who uses linux in text-only mode or with a display that can't do rgb in 2026 in any situation that isn't headless or exotic? Why can't they just run more complex stuff on the framebuffer with rgb colour if they want it? Why, given the above, is emoji support in text-only mode important? to whom? For what?
> I ask myself since years: Does this terminal still switch to an actual text mode, or does the text get rendered in a framebuffer by the OS.
Why would anybody who isn't working with extremely exotic legacy hardware care about this in 2026?
> And even more so all the applications that I know that I could run inside it.
Which ones don't run in terminology?
> Again, I'm always open for something exciting.
...as long as it's not the heresy of displaying graphics in a a teminal.
> for all the comfort I get back,
See this is the point right here. You consider it comfort. I consider it nuisance. So go use your GUI applications and enjoy them and let others enjoy their preference. Like I said a hundred thousand years ago.
> But yeah, my basic point was not actually to evangelize for Dolphin or VLC or any particular app.
No, it was to say - without having even bothered to try it yourself - that there's no use for a thing that I use all the time. And then in order to support your thesis you started evangelising the massive pile of software that you'd use to achieve what I can do better with one program that I always have running.
> Well, how do "the kids" get their Git icons etc? As far as I can remember, they call it "Nerd Fonts".
How are nerd fonts at all relevant to any part of the discussion?
Oh, I see: You said "[dolphin] even can render actual icons without a patched terminal font!"...
...you mean like terminology and other graphics-supporting terminals can? If they were using terminology or kitty, they wouldn't need to patch the nerd font icons into their terminal font - they could just display the icon they want.
So your point was to sarcastically suggest another actually-pretty-good use-case for the functionality you're arguing against. Got it.
> But all I've tried are buggy sometimes in what glyph widths they report
And what happened when you filed bug reports about this? Please link to them, I'll be interested to read your reports for more detail than none at all.
> If terminology does better in that regard, good news! Nice!
Well I don't know whether it does or not. Because you haven't bothered to actually describe the issue you claim exists in any detail. Or done anything more than make a vague and as-far-as-i-can-tell-incorrect assertion that terminals can't display emojis properly. As if that was somehow relevant to whether they should be able to display graphics or not.
> As an application developer, I still cannot assume that my users all have terminology, so it's still no solution
As an application developer, you have control over this thing called "system requirements" for your software. And you can do things like adding "requires terminology" or "feature X requires terminology" in there. Or you could put a note on the relevant issue in your issue tracker saying "you can work around this by using terminology, which doesn't have this issue". But of course we'd need to know whether that's true, first, and for that we'd need more than zero detail.
Or perhaps you should just make your application graphical, since you've said solves the problem you're having with emojis and repeatedly asserted that graphical software is inherently better.
Which of these is appropriate, i don't know, because you'd have to give more than zero detail for me to be able to tell.
Maybe when you're linking to more than zero detail you can also explain how it has anything to do with whether supporting graphics in terminals is a good idea.
Oh, I see: You said "[dolphin] even can render actual icons without a patched terminal font!"...
...you mean like terminology and other graphics-supporting terminals can? If they were using terminology or kitty, they wouldn't need to patch the nerd font icons into their terminal font - they could just display the icon they want.
So your point was to sarcastically suggest another actually-pretty-good use-case for the functionality you're arguing against. Got it.
And what happened when you filed bug reports about this? Please link to them, I'll be interested to read your reports for more detail than none at all. Well I don't know whether it does or not. Because you haven't bothered to actually describe the issue you claim exists in any detail. Or done anything more than make a vague and as-far-as-i-can-tell-incorrect assertion that terminals can't display emojis properly. As if that was somehow relevant to whether they should be able to display graphics or not. As an application developer, you have control over this thing called "system requirements" for your software. And you can do things like adding "requires terminology" or "feature X requires terminology" in there. Or you could put a note on the relevant issue in your issue tracker saying "you can work around this by using terminology, which doesn't have this issue". But of course we'd need to know whether that's true, first, and for that we'd need more than zero detail.Or perhaps you should just make your application graphical, since you've said solves the problem you're having with emojis and repeatedly asserted that graphical software is inherently better.
Which of these is appropriate, i don't know, because you'd have to give more than zero detail for me to be able to tell.
Maybe when you're linking to more than zero detail you can also explain how it has anything to do with whether supporting graphics in terminals is a good idea.