I don't think you could get your manager to approve that as a 20% project.
More likely, it's someone's personal project they worked on in their spare time, but it still belongs to Google (because everything does, according to most engineering contracts there).
> everything does, according to most engineering contracts there
Most of the contracts I've heard about only transfer ownership if you use company resources to work on it. Any project done in your free time, with your own resources, belongs to you.
If you use a Mac, the Iterm2 terminal emulator has an additional protocol that supports rendering images [0]. It basically encodes the image with terminal escape sequences, and also works for animated gifs.
Unfortunately, it seems to not be a standard - it would be neat if there were such a standard, and if other terminals could/would do similarly. It seems like the silliest thing but I like being able to easily indicate when my tests fail or not:
alias SUCCESS="echo -e '\n\nSUCCESS' \
&& imgcat ~/Pictures/success-100.png \
|| imgcat ~/Pictures/fail-100.png"
make test && SUCCESS
It's not standard, but there are other terms with their own custom escape codes such as Terminology (from Enlightenment DE) and Kitty (not to be confused with KiTTY, the fork of PuTTY).
There is also the sixel escape sequences will render using 6 pixel character blocks and is supported in xterm with the vt250 (iirc) support enabled.
For what it's worth, xterm also supports vector graphics if you enable the right kind of VT mode. But that's a whole other discussion :)
It's entirely possible to write a GIF to the framebuffer (setting aside that the framebuffer is deprecated in favor of KMS+DRM) without implicating X11.
I see. So I guess it's not really possible to do something like the OP with mixed text/graphics, sadly, you have to either stick to text or get an X11 terminal.
Why do you think that? Is it because you personally find no value in this project? If you don't understand what the value of this project would be then it's not for you but that doesn't mean it has no value. Also, computer science and programming are built on the two mule team of 'because we need it' and 'because we can!' This is nothing new.
The industry is, to a degree, cyclical and prone to fashions; CLI was everything in the 80s, then went out of style in many circles in the 90s and 00s, and now is coming back into style in more circles. And with each new wave we get new variations and fun things as new people hit the old ideas with new perspectives:)
I don't know, I grew up on a farm but I've never heard that before that I can think of. It was probably planed there at some point by old farmers talking but I can't be sure.
which was reprised in an episode of arrested development where Henry Winkler (who played Fonzie in Happy Days) jumps over a shark on a dock: https://i.imgur.com/uHPHW0c.gif
Demo: https://asciinema.org/a/kjsWPMv5qtn87IHRd4th3EuNB