Nota is not much about calculator itself, it's about fun with ASCII art. there exists tons of more powerful calculators with much much better rendering. But I really agree, if we had a better system than text-only terminals it would have been sooo amazing

Kitty

Kitty also has their own custom protocol for images. That's exactly what they try to accomplish in this discussion thread, to get one common protocol which is used by all modern terminals. The developer of Kitty is also in there.

We've had image support in terms possible for years. I don't think that's what's needed to make a nice command line math program.

Instead, we need term programs that can handle type ligatures better. Being able to use something like FF Chartwell in a terminal would be amazing .. and would lead the way to having properly formatted mathematical notation in the terminal, without requiring a new standard to implement. Ligatures are already a thing - they just need to be better supported by the term apps.

You probably mean SIXEL? That is very limited, has drawbacks, and is not supported by many terminals (not exactly sure why, maybe too complicated, or too ugly). It's also discussed exactly in that thread. Developers from tmux, iTerm, mintty, xterm.js, Kitty, and others are in there.

A cheer for sixel ;) https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ https://github.com/nilqed/latex2sixel

SIXEL for displaying bitmap images, yes.

But I mean that term apps should have better support for ligatures - as in font/type ligatures - for doing proper mathematics.

Also there is a deep need for better fonts. Currently only Menlo renders things right.