On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 04:26:57PM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
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.
That's a pretty neat use case for an image viewer in a terminal. -- Len Sorensen