alt Hacker NewsI don't understand your arguments.
Whatever desktop environment you're referring to probably uses some of the same underlying third-party libraries for file format support as EFL, so what's the difference?
Why would being able to display graphical elements in my terminal program only be useful if it were supported on the Linux virtual console or some other terminal program I don't use?
Why would you expect "the same folks" to stop working on projects they find interesting or useful in favor of fixing your problems with entirely different applications?
At first, I don't expect anything from anybody; that's just way beyond my privileges, unfortunately... :D I can only comment things and add my 2 ct.
All the terminal tech ecosystem is already somewhat beyond it's actual capabilities. You see that when you e.g. use tmux or screen. Or when you just have some emojis which are actually wider than the API tells you and your alignment goes off the rails. Or that conceptual discrepancy between the 16 colors support, where users can typically decide freely how exactly each color should look like (up to the point of having the background in white instead of black), and then the additional 256-color support, which adds 240 more colors (or sth like that?!), but with really fixed color values...
Everything is just a historically grown mess. And I've just mentioned a few points that came to my mind spontaneously, and there are probably a lot of further problems that I've never even heard about.
With that in mind, when I hear about the idea of hacking full graphics support into that, as a professional software developer my first instinct is to understand whether that's really worth the trouble. And what the rationale behind is. And whether it actually makes sense, from an architecture perspective if you want to call it this way. And all the arguments that I've read here made no sense to me at all. It feels more like a cult when I talk to terminal-centric users.
I don't have any privileges to decide for any involved project, though. If e.g. Konsole starts supporting that tomorrow, well, I'd doubt this was a useful thing, but then that's what it is. I could then only hope that they didn't break other things.
As a Linux user since 20 years, my experience tells me that all these things always break something else.
And then it's basically for people who say that basic image viewers start too slow for them. Either that's trivially fixable (and then we'd all be better off doing _that_ instead!), or just an illusion/cult, or the EFL previews will not be faster. There is just no way they could be faster. A basic graphical image viewer would do the same thing, just without all these indirection, translation to escape sequences, interpreting them again, etc.
Similar for the matters of proper keyboard support.