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

Based on the value of $TERM, viuer decides whether to use the Kitty protocol or not. 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 (see Usage):

• Animated GIF support
• Accept media through stdin
• Custom dimensions
• Transparency

Installation from source requires a local Rust environment. Please note that at least Rust 1.39 is required.

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

First, you will need the WASI target installed in your Rust system:

rustup target add wasm32-wasi --toolchain nightly

Once WASI is available, you can build the WebAssembly binary by yourself with:

cargo +nightly build --release --target wasm32-wasi

This will create a new file located at target/wasm32-wasi/release/viu.wasm.

When the wasm file is created you can upload it to wapm or execute it with wasmer:

wapm publish
# OR
wasmer run  target/wasm32-wasi/release/viu.wasm --dir=. -- img/giphy.gif

A precompiled binary can be downloaded from the release page.

Viu can be installed in Linux, macOS and Windows using wapm:

wapm install -g viu

There is an AUR package available for Arch Linux.

On a Kitty terminal:

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

Ctrl-C was pressed to stop the GIFs.

Examples:

• viu img/giphy.gif
• viu img/*
• viu ~/Pictures -rn

The shell will expand the wildcard above and viu will display all the images in the folder one after the other. For a more informative output when dealing with folders the flag -n could be used.

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 (second example) the GIF will be displayed only once.

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.

USAGE:
    viu [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] [FILE]...
    When FILE is -, read standard input.

FLAGS:
    -m, --mirror         Display a mirror of the original image
    -n, --name           Output the name of the file before displaying
    -1, --once           Only loop once through the animation
    -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, --verbose        Output what is going on

OPTIONS:
    -h, --height <height>    Resize the image to a provided height
    -w, --width <width>      Resize the image to a provided width

ARGS:
    <FILE>...    The image to be displayed