imgvwr

Minimalistic, dead-simple image viewer with only function to view images, which follows unix philosophy

Powered by iced. You can think of this as a viewer widget from iced, enhanced with configurable options and minor additions

Features:

• lightweight
• native wayland support on linux
• crossplatform
• shows images

Cons:

• shows not all images (see image crate features list)
• shows not moving images (e.g. gif) -> iced #1412

Prefer using better software if you want more features and proper support

Why then?

Because there's some stuff I don't like, of course. Personally, I'd recommend to use these exceptional tools:

• imageglass -- I remember it being pretty good, but since it's windows-only I haven't used it for last several years, so I don't know what's current state of the project
• qimgv -- I think it's the best tool for x11 session, but it has some minor issues on wayland session. These are partially resolved when compiling it with qt6, but it needs proper migration for this to work out. The main cons it that it's not developed actively for last two years. For pros, it has the best upscaling filter I've encountered in open-source image viewers so far and handles numerous formats. I also absolutely love how gifs playback implemented out here
• imv -- nice and minimalistic, great wayland support, but not enough configuration options available, e.g. it lacks configuring floating point scaling value (only integer values are supported). Also, like qimgv - project is a bit dead, though it still recieves useful PRs and feedback
• oculante -- viewer with extremely friendly and passionate maintainer. Supports all modern OSes, works great on wayland, nice performance and so on. As for cons, there's no binary package for it and its build time is VERY slow and resource-consuming because of heavy dependency tree. The supported format list is also a bit smaller than the qimgv's for example

Of course there are more tools for this purpose here and there, but I didn't like those for a different reasons, so didn't use them for quite enough time to remember

For me, the motivation was that I wanted an oculante, which would be faster to compile, without features I don't need and with a simple code base, so I can fix it right away or file a pr/issue in appropriate place. That's it. It handles formats I need, it handles wayland natively, its performance is not bad and it has a config file with all the options that I use. It will probably even work on RedoxOS without changes to a code base!

Usage

imgvwr -i image.png

Config

Config file isn't created automatically. If you want to use your own config, copy repo's config.toml file into ~/.config/imgvwr/config.toml and edit it. Or you can copy it elsewhere and pass via arguments: imgvwr -i image.png -c config.toml

See the config.toml file for possible values and explanations

I want %feature%

I prefer implementing new features in upstream projects and contributing a PR there to maintain this project's simplicity, so in most cases your issues are probably realted to something upstream. I also don't want to add any more external dependencies, at least for now, so keep it in mind. But feel free to ask anything in issues here too, I'm not against it in any way

As for common issues:

• if it's related to supported image formats, then you should check out the image repo first. If the desired image format isn't supported in image - you can file a new issue there. Format's support in iced may be important too though, since current implementation relies on their format support (which relies on image crate), but AFAIK we may have an opportunity to load bytes directly after iced #2356 merges

• if it's related to image-viewing capabilities, you should check out the iced repo first, if your feature is implemented there. E.g. you want more FilterMethods to be available. If there are such methods implemented in iced and not in imgvwr - file an issue/PR here and I'll add the support for it. If it's not - file an issue or PR into iced repo for this feature to be implemented there first

• if it's related to image modifications (paint, crop, etc) or a directory view then it's not planned

TODO

• FilterMethod support for Viewer -> iced #2324
• ContentFit support for Viewer -> iced #2330
• in progress rotate widget instead of image to improve perf/memory consuming -> iced #2467
• moar perf improvements -> iced #2382
• [repo] ci/cd
• [repo] dependabot