Turn your terminal into a fast, focused media viewer for images, audio, and videos without leaving the command line.
(Part of kit* series of graphic terminal apps: kitim kitmd kitpdf kitdraw kitDOOM)
(kitim only works in a Kitty-graphics-compatible terminal such as Kitty, Ghostty, cmux, WezTerm)
cargo install kitim
(Audio and video playback require ffmpeg installed, brew install ffmpeg on MacOS)
- Stop bouncing from terminal to Finder, Preview, or a browser just to inspect a file.
- Preview images, animated GIFs, videos, and audio in the same place you already work.
- Keep media checks scriptable, keyboard-first, and fast enough for real terminal workflows.
- Inline visual previews powered by the Kitty graphics protocol, so media appears directly in your terminal.
- Video playback with synced audio using FFmpeg decoding, CPAL output, and a render thread tuned for smooth playback.
- Audio-only playback for common formats such as MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, FLAC, OGG, and Opus.
- Tiny controls, useful defaults: zoom output, override playback FPS, and loop videos, GIFs, or audio when you need to inspect media.
kitim screenshot.png
kitim song.mp3
kitim -z 0.7 clip.webm
kitim --loop --frame-rate 24 animation.giffile path -> image/GIF decoder or FFmpeg -> RGBA frames -> Kitty graphics chunks -> terminal
audio -> resampler -> CPAL output
video audio -> resampler -> CPAL output -> sync clock
kitim keeps the rendering path direct: decode into RGBA, resize to terminal cell geometry, chunk through the Kitty protocol, and use audio timing as the playback clock when a video has sound.