iview

Iview

Iview is yet another image viewer. It is not a replacement for the popular ones like eog, fim, feh, photos etc, it is just tailored made for me. The functionality i want from an image viewer is currently provided from the combination file manager+image viewer. I wanted something more integrated.

• Just display images, no editing capabilities.
• Quickly browse pages with icons to find the photos you want.
• No visual clutter. No buttons, titles, input forms, other windows etc. Just use the mouse in an intuitive way. This is essential when using a wall projector.
• No scroll bars. Treat marked icons as bookmarks and move around. You don't have to remember if a photo was near the top or just before the middle.
• Work well together with other unix tools. Give input with find, view the images and print the paths of the selected ones to be used in another shell pipeline.
• Work well with remote file systems. The image viewers i have used, assume local images. They create thumbnails in hidden directories and assume images will be fetched and decoded fast. This is not the case if the file server runs on a raspberry and is accessed with wifi. This needs aggresive caching and image prefetching.

Enjoy!

Install

Iview is written in go. You need the go SDK which you can install with your OS package manager or download it from here.

For graphics it uses plan9port. The library is very portable and runs on Linux, BSDs, MacOS and Windows WSL. You can install it with your OS package manager or from source from here.

To install iview, simply

go install github.com/anastasop/iview@latest

If you just want to try it with docker, use

./docker-demo.sh <dir path>

This takes some time, as it fetches the go debian image and builds plan9port from source.

Usage

For starters

iview <image dir>

It will load images and start with a view of icons, like this:

You can use the mouse for simple actions: left button displays an image, right button marks an image and the middle button (click scroll wheel or ctrl+left button), displays the menu:

• mark marks the image, same as right button.
• plumb plumbs the image. This is a plan9 term, think it as display with the system viewer.
• prev page go to the previous page.
• next page go to the next page.
• marked display only the marked images.
• prev mark go to the immediate previous page with a marked image.
• next mark go to the immediate next page with a marked image.
• exit exit

The display view presents the full image, scaled to fit window, with some information.

Again you can use the mouse for simple actions: left button displays the previous image, right button displays the next image and middle button displays the menu:

• info toggle display of image information.
• mark marks the image.
• plumb plumbs the image. This is a plan9 term, think it as display with the system viewer.
• back go back to the icons view.

Finally the marked view is like the icon view but with a restricted menu:

License

Licensed under the 3-Clause BSD License.

BUGS

• use a better algorithm to draw icons view and reduce the gaps between icons.
• add simple editing like rotations, or zoom.
• maybe extract the cache to a separate process memory only 9p server.
• add support for cbz, useful for reading comics.