JSixel

JNA based Java bindings for libsixel.

Who Is This For?

• Java terminal emulator authors who want to parse and display sixel images.
• Java command line application authors who want to output images inside other terminals that support sixels.
• Image tool authors who may wish to convert to and from sixels.

Features

• Ships with pre-compiled libsixel libraries for Linux Intel and Arm, Windows and Mac OS (all 64 bit). Other systems must have it installed externally.
• Low level bindings matching libsixel API.
• High level file based encoder and decoder (similar to python/libsixel/encoder.py and python/libsixel/decoder.py).
• High level object oriented API for converting image files to sixel files and vice versa.
• Clones of img2sixel and sixel2png with full command line option compatibility.
• JPMS compatible.

For more information on basic usage see lib/README.md

Modules

Libsixel's built-in image encoders only work with files, so the following optional modules should be used if you want to convert using sources and targets other than files using an object oriented API.

The module to pick will depend on the GUI toolkit (if any) you wish to use.

• Swing/AWT using using BufferedImage.
• JavaFX using Image.
• SWT using ImageData.
• Slim basic decoder (For PNG, JPEG and BMP only at the moment).
• Supply and consume raw RGB/A and indexed data via ByteBuffer.

Each module has slightly different capabilities.

Module	Toolkit	Encode Image File -> Sixel File	Decode Sixel File -> Image File	Encode Sixel Stream -> Image Stream	Decode Sixel Stream -> Image Stream
None	Any	Yes	Yes	No	No
jsixel-awt	Swing/AWT	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
jsixel-javafx	JavaFX	Yes	Raw Only	Yes	Raw Only
jsixel-swt	SWT	Yes	Raw Only	Yes	Raw Only
jsixel-slim	None	Yes	Raw Only	Yes	Raw Only

• While all modules support raw bitmaps, Raw Only means it will only decode to raw indexed bitmaps (as supplied by libsixel).
• All other modules can in theory at least load all of the image types the toolkit supports, although at this stage there may be some bugs in lesser used formats. Only AWT and SWT can currently save to specialised image formats.

TODO

• Graal compatibility.
• Animation support.
• More pre-built libraries for different platforms and architectures.
• Use newer fork of libsixel.