This is cool, but I get the feeling it is just a workaround for the broken state of current terminals. Why are they still character based? We have had bitmap displays as long as I have had a computer, but we still emulate text terminals.

There are graphical terminals in programs like Maple and Matlab, and some years ago there was talk of an XML-based terminal, but nothing happens.

Sorry for the rant. I just couldn't help my self.

There are some shells like that:

http://poshconsole.codeplex.com/

Windows only - WPF based Powershell console.

I think the simple reason is there are better tools for working with graphics. Text terminals were great, and are still immensely productive if you are proficient with the command-set. Even in a full-blown word processor, people have trouble laying out text along with graphics. It would simply turn out to be chaotic I fear.

Hmm, I've just tried it. It has potential, but it's very slow and sluggish on my machine (quad).

"XML-based terminal"

talk about a Heaven meets Hell scenario

It reminds me the famous libcaca:

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

One of my favorite application of the libcaca is neercs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQr42LjaNCY

Lobstertech: I couldn't help but be reminded of the fancy things we did with ANSI graphics in the BBS days. Merging the gif/jpg to ansi converter was very clever. This could make for some interesting terminal programs.

yeah this gives me flashbacks to the 80's

looks very cool, but running easy_install fabulous on Mac 10.5 installed a broken version. the demo threw some errors and the whole thing blinked and didn't show all the colors. blinking terminal....

might work if i build it myself and sort out the ld dependencies. anyway, still a cool project. not sure i'll ever have use for it...maybe for debug apps.

On 10.6, it installs fine.

After hacking out the PIL check in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/fabulous-0.1.5-py2.6.egg/fabulous/{test,image}.py and fixing the imports to import Image, the demo runs okay.

Which is to say Terminal.app fails to render; when using xterm and X11 locally, or ssh-ing from Linux into OS X, 'fabulous' looks fine.

The library is complaining about not being able to find gcc. It'll still fall back to the pure-python code and work properly. I made a release this morning to make that error message a less noisy debug message.

As for the blinking lights, rxvt based terminals like Terminal.app only support 4-bit color. I'll be making a 0.2 release soon to automatically downgrade colors for these types of terminals.

Also Mac's Terminal app is only 16 color.

Not if you turn on ANSI color

It works a little better in iTerm, at least it shows more colors, but it still has the blinking problem.

You can also install it via pip:

sudo pip install fabulous