viu

A small command-line application to view images from the terminal written in Rust. It uses lower half blocks (▄ or \u2584) to fit 2 pixels into a single cell by adjusting foreground and background colours accordingly.

Features (see Usage):

• Animated GIF support
• Accept media through stdin
• Custom dimensions

Installation

wapm install -g viu

Usage

Ctrl-C was pressed to stop the GIFs.

Examples:

• viu --dir=. img/giphy.gif
• viu --dir=. img/*

The shell will expand the wildcard above and viu will display all the images in the folder one after the other. For a more informative output when dealing with folders the flag -n could be used.

When viu receives only one file and it is GIF, it will be displayed over and over until Ctrl-C is pressed. However, when couple of files are up for display (second example) the GIF will be displayed only once.

Aspect Ratio

If no flags are supplied to viu it will try to get the size of the terminal where it was invoked. If it succeeds it will fit the image and preserve the aspect ratio. The aspect ratio will be changed only if both options -w and -h are used together.

Command line options

USAGE:
    viu [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <FILE>...
FLAGS:
    -m, --mirror        Display a mirror of the original image
    -t, --transparent   Display transparent pixels in the color of the terminal
    -n, --name          Output the name of the file before displaying
    -v, --verbose       Output what is going on
OPTIONS:
    -h, --height <height>    Resize the image to a provided height
    -w, --width <width>      Resize the image to a provided width
ARGS:
    <FILE>...    The image to be displayed

Building from Source

First, you will need the WASI target installed in your Rust system:

rustup target add wasm32-wasi

Once WASI is available, you can build the WebAssembly binary by yourself with:

cargo build --release --target wasm32-wasi

This will create a new file located at target/wasm32-wasi/release/viu.wasm.

When the wasm file is created you can upload it to wapm or execute it with wasmer:

wapm publish
# OR
wasmer run  target/wasm32-wasi/release/viu.wasm --dir=. -- img/giphy.gif

You can also build a native executable with

cargo build