One of our favorite adages is “A picture is worth a thousand words”. It refers to the notion that a still image can convey a complex idea. Images can portray a lot of information quickly and more efficiently than text. They capture memories, and never let you forget something you want to remember, and refresh it in your memory.
Images are part of every day internet usage, and are particularly important for social media engagement. A good image viewer is an essential part of any operating system.
timg is different from the vast majority of image viewers. It’s a small command-line program to view images from the terminal. Not only does it display images in a terminal, it also supports the Kitty Graphics Protocol. This allows you to view high resolution images direct in a terminal. And the software also lets you watch animations and videos within the terminal.
timg is written in C++.
Installation
Installing timg on our Ubuntu systems was plain sailing. Just issue the command:
$ sudo apt install timg</code$>
This command also installs a couple of packages which are dependencies: libgraphicsmagick++-q16-12 and libopenslide0.
Besides the Debian/Ubuntu package, there are also packages for Arch (and Arch-based distros), MX Linux, Raspbian, Void Linux, NixOS, and macOS.
If you’re running a distro without an official package, you may want to use the snap. While we don’t think snaps offer the ideal solution, they do offer very easy installation. And life is too short to compile every program for yourself, particularly if you like experimenting with new software.
You also have unfettered access to the source code. We didn’t try to compile the source code ourselves due to time constraints.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation / Summary