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.
viu is different from the vast majority of image viewers. It’s a small command-line program to view images from the terminal. It also supports the Kitty Graphics Protocol. This allows you to view high resolution images direct in a terminal.
viu is written in Rust and published under an open source license.
Installation
You won’t find an official package available for viu in the Ubuntu repositories. Compiling the source code isn’t difficult though.
On a vanilla installation of Ubuntu, we first need to install cargo. That’s the Rust package manager. The software downloads your Rust package’s dependencies, compiles your packages, makes distributable packages, and uploads them to crates.io, the Rust community’s package registry.
cargo is available as a regular Ubuntu package or a snap. We chose to install the former:
$ sudo apt install cargo
Next, clone the project’s GitHub repository with the command:
$ git clone https://github.com/atanunq/viu.git
Change into the newly created directory:
$ cd viu
Run the cargo command:
$ cargo install --path .
The developer provides a binary, and there are packages available for Arch (and Arch-based distros) and NetBSD.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation / Summary
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