On Fri, 13 Mar 2026 at 15:33, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 02:48:48PM -0400, William Park via Talk wrote:
CachyOS repository doesn't have "timg", but it has "viu" which Google AI actually recommends. It seems "viu" only works on graphical terminal (eg. Konsole here). On virtual terminal, it's blocky, where each block is char size.
So, that begs question... Why would you use "timg" or "viu", when every GUI desktop comes with graphic viewer (eg. Gwenview here)? Or, when you can use ImageMagick's "display" as last resort?
I think this is a case of "because you can".
Oh, there's always a bit of that. But no. First, and least important: I don't have to exit the terminal to use it. I don't have to deal with firing off an instance of `gwenview` or `ristretto`, I don't have to remember the key combo to close that other program and return to the terminal. More important: on my primary machine, I have an account where I do all my website development. This is a separate account from my main account that runs X11/Wayland. So I _can't_ run an image viewer from that account, it doesn't have permission to access the GUI. But `timg` works. The same _probably_ applies to remote web servers, like Digital Ocean or Azure. This is less clear, as it would require installing `timg` on the remote and I haven't tried that. But to view an image uploaded by someone else on a remote server, you have to `curl` that file to your local and then open it with an image viewer: kind of wrecks your flow. `timg` would be immensely superior. Thanks for mentioning `viu`. Sadly, it isn't currently available in the Debian repository. And as with my logic choosing `kitty` over `ghostty`, `timg` is Good Enough (TM) so I won't be spending the time to build `viu` from source. But I'll keep an eye on it. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com