Is it possible to have sort of a hybrid terminal that can display isolated images in one or more designated panes?
As I understand it, modern terminals are graphical emulations anyway, so obviously they have the underlying capability to display images.
The way I envision this working is one of two ways:
(1) have a designated or named area of the screen for graphics and the terminal text would wrap around it, or
(2) the images would just print inline with the lines of text; so you would give a command like "show mypicture.png" and the picture would appear below the current line and just scroll off the screen as more commands were entered.
Option (1) would make more sense for a curses-type environment where the application had 2D control over the terminal.
Best Answer
Before X Windows there were several attempts at 'inband' graphic protocols. 4014 mode in classic xterm is one. I've seen it do some real work about 25 years ago to do wire frame 3d drawings. A more powerful graphics protocol in early 1980's VT300+ terminals was the DEC REGIS graphics. This was a full raster graphics language with options for 'mouse like' input and a range of drawing primitives (lines, filled/unfilled circles and rectangles). All encoded in an extended version of the classic VT### escape sequences. Some of the REGIS terminals had local 'tiny basic' interpreters and could run local programs downloaded via in band escape sequences. One could imagine had CPU's and memory been just a little larger, entire GUI's could have been developed as an alternative approach to X Window like systems.