FAQs

Why?

• Why not?

• To improve and extend the capabilities of CLI and TUI applications.

• Terminals emulators have always been and always will be!

What about Windows support?

• Only the new Windows Terminal seems to have proper ANSI support and mordern terminal emulator features.

• Drawing images and animations doesn’t work completely well with Python for Windows. See Known Issues.

• If stuck on Windows and want to use all features, you could use WSL + Windows Terminal.

Why are colours not properly reproduced with BlockImage’s DIRECT render method?

• Some terminals support direct-color control sequences but actually use a 256-color pallete. This limits color reproduction.

Why are images out of scale?

• If Auto Cell Ratio is supported and enabled, call enable_win_size_swap(). If this doesn’t work, then open an issue here with adequate details.

• Otherwise, adjust the cell ratio using set_cell_ratio().

Why does my program get garbage input (possibly also written to the screen) or phantom keystrokes?

• This is most definitely due to slow reponse of the terminal emulator to Terminal Queries.

• To resolve this, set a higher timeout using set_query_timeout(). The default is DEFAULT_QUERY_TIMEOUT seconds.

• You can also disable terminal queries using disable_queries() but note that this disables certain features.