viu

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• Description
• Features
• Installation
  • From source (recommended)
  • Binary
  • Packages
    • MacOS
    • Arch Linux
    • NetBSD
• Usage
  • Examples
  • iTerm note
  • Aspect Ratio
  • Command line options

Description

A small command-line application to view images from the terminal written in Rust. It is basically the front-end of viuer. It uses either iTerm or Kitty graphics protocol, if supported. If not, lower half blocks (▄ or \u2584) are displayed instead.

Based on the value of $TERM, viuer decides which protocol to use. For half blocks, $COLORTERM is inspected. If it contains either truecolor or 24bit, truecolor (16 million colors) will be used. If not, it will fallback to using only ansi256. A nice explanation can be found in this gist.

Features

• Native iTerm and Kitty support
• Animated GIF support
• Accept media through stdin
• Custom dimensions
• Transparency
• Experimental Sixel support (behind the sixel feature flag)

Installation

From source (recommended)

Installation from source requires a local Rust environment.

git clone https://github.com/atanunq/viu.git

# Build & Install
cd viu/
cargo install --path .

# Use
viu img/giphy.gif

Or without cloning:

cargo install viu

Binary

A precompiled binary can be downloaded from the release page. GPG fingerprint is B195BADA40BEF20E4907A5AC628280A0217A7B0F.

Packages

MacOS

Available in brew.

brew install viu

Arch Linux

Available in community/viu.

pacman -S viu

NetBSD

Available in graphics/viu.

Usage

Examples

On a Kitty terminal:

On a Mac with iTerm:

Using half blocks (Kitty protocol and tmux do not get along):

Ctrl-C was pressed to stop the GIFs.

When viu receives only one file and it is GIF, it will be displayed over and over until Ctrl-C is pressed. However, when couple of files are up for display the GIF will be displayed only once.

iTerm note

iTerm can handle GIFs by itself with better performance, but configuration through --once and --frame-rate will have no effect there.

Aspect Ratio

If no flags are supplied to viu it will try to get the size of the terminal where it was invoked. If it succeeds it will fit the image and preserve the aspect ratio. The aspect ratio will be changed only if both options -w and -h are used together.

Command line options

USAGE:
    viu [OPTIONS] [FILE]...

ARGS:
    <FILE>...    The images to be displayed. Set to - for standard input.

OPTIONS:
        --help                              Print help information
    -1, --once                              Only loop once through the animation
    -b, --blocks                            Force block output
    -n, --name                              Output the name of the file before displaying
    -r, --recursive                         Recurse down directories if passed one
    -s, --static                            Show only first frame of gif
    -t, --transparent                       Display transparent image with transparent background
    -V, --version                           Print version information
    -w, --width <width>                     Resize the image to a provided width
    -h, --height <height>                   Resize the image to a provided height
    -f, --frame-rate <frames-per-second>    Play gif at the given frame rate