vimg 0.3.0

An image viewer for the command line

Author: Johannes Hansen

Why?

If you are like me, you spend a lot of time in command line environments. One of the few things that are hard to deal with in such an environment is images.

This little tool is meant to allow for quick viewing of image files in the command line.

The image is rendered using a combination of background color, foreground color and unicode character for each character cell to optimally represent the original pixels. The challenge is the limited color palette of 256 colors.

In the simplest case, each character cell represents one pixel. However, the resolution can be doubled by printing a half-block character in a different color in that character cell. Alternatively, the color accuracy can be improved by mixing two available colors in foreground and background, thus losing the gained resolution.

The default mode attempts to optimize the rendering by optimizing resolution in areas of high detail, and optimizing color accuracy in areas of low detail.

Installation

$ pip install vimg

Requirements

A terminal that supports 256 colors.

The script is based on curses and opencv for Python. Make sure you have those installed.

Usage

$ vimg path/to/image

GUI modes

Once in the GUI, you can change between different viewing modes:

Key shortcut	Mode	Description
C	color	display color-optimized image
H	highres	display resolution optimized image
O	optimal	(default) display an optimal representation of the image. Trade-off between color accuracy and resolution
A	ascii	display a black-and-white representation of the image
E	edge	(experimental) edge detection based rendering
+/-	–	zoom in/out (by 30%)
h j k l or arrow keys	–	move view (by 10%)
r	–	refresh the screen
q	–	quit

Limitations

The script currently only supports image files that are natively supported by OpenCV (.jpg, .png, .bmp).

To Do

Future plans include:

• Support for more image file types, e.g. .gif

• Improvement of the edge detection mode

• Make opencv dependency optional