John Reed via imv-devel
imv
is a command line image viewer intended for use with tiling window managers.
imv is currently seeking a new maintainer to adopt it. Please email the author if interested.
The following examples are a quick illustration of how you can use imv. For detailed documentation see the man page.
# Opening images
imv image1.png another_image.jpeg a_directory
# Opening a directory recursively
imv -r Photos
# Opening images via stdin
find . -type f -name "*.svg" | imv
# Open an image fullscreen
imv -f image.jpeg
# Viewing images in a random order
find . -type f -name "*.png" | shuf | imv
# Viewing images from stdin
curl http://somesi.te/img.png | imv -
# Viewing multiple images from the web
curl -Osw '%{filename_effective}\n' 'http://www.example.com/[1-10].jpg' | imv
imv can be used to display slideshows. You can set the number of seconds to
show each image for with the -t
option at start up, or you can configure it
at runtime using the t
and T
hotkeys to increase and decrease the image
display time, respectively.
To cycle through a folder of pictures, showing each one for 10 seconds:
imv -t 10 ~/Pictures/London
imv's key bindings can be customised to trigger custom behaviour:
[binds]
# Delete and then close an open image by pressing 'X'
<Shift+X> = exec rm "$imv_current_file"; close
# Rotate the currently open image by 90 degrees by pressing 'R'
<Shift+R> = exec mogrify -rotate 90 "$imv_current_file"
# Use dmenu as a prompt for tagging the current image
u = exec echo "$imv_current_file" >> ~/tags/$(ls ~/tags | dmenu -p "tag")
With the default bindings, imv can be used to select images in a pipeline by
using the p
hotkey to print the current image's path to stdout. The -l
flag
can also be used to tell imv to list the remaining paths on exit for a "open
set of images, close unwanted ones with x
, then quit imv to pass the
remaining images through" workflow.
Key bindings can be customised to run arbitrary shell commands. Environment
variables are exported to expose imv's state to scripts run by it. These
scripts can in turn modify imv's behaviour by invoking imv-msg
with
$imv_pid
.
For example:
#!/usr/bin/bash
imv "$@" &
imv_pid = $!
while true; do
# Some custom logic
# ...
# Close all open files
imv-msg $imv_pid close all
# Open some new files
imv-msg $imv_pid open ~/new_path
# Run another script against the currently open file
imv-msg $imv_pid exec another-script.sh '$imv_current_file'
done
Library | Version | Notes |
---|---|---|
pthreads | Required. | |
xkbcommon | Required. | |
pangocairo | Required. | |
icu | Required. | |
X11 | Optional. Required for X11 support. | |
GLU | Optional. Required for X11 support. | |
xcb | Optional. Required for X11 support. | |
xkbcommon-x11 | Optional. Required for X11 support. | |
wayland-client | Optional. Required for Wayland support. | |
wayland-egl | Optional. Required for Wayland support. | |
EGL | Optional. Required for Wayland support. | |
FreeImage | Optional. Provides PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, etc. | |
libtiff | Optional. Provides TIFF support. | |
libpng | Optional. Provides PNG support. | |
libjpeg-turbo | Optional. Provides JPEG support. | |
librsvg | >=v2.44 | Optional. Provides SVG support. |
libnsgif | Optional. Provides animated GIF support. | |
libheif | Optional. Provides HEIF support. | |
libjxl | Optional. Provides JPEGXL support. |
Dependencies are determined by which backends and window systems are enabled
when building imv
. You can find a summary of which backends are available
in meson_options.txt
$ meson build/
$ ninja -C build/
# ninja -C build/ install
--prefix
controls installation prefix. If more control over installation
paths is required, --bindir
, --mandir
and --datadir
are
available. Eg. to install imv
to home directory, run:
$ meson --bindir=~/bin --prefix=~/.local
imv
's source is published under the terms of the MIT license.