README.md

Swayimg: image viewer for Wayland

Fully customizable and lightweight image viewer for Wayland based display servers.

• Support for the most popular image formats:
  • JPEG (via libjpeg),
  • JPEG XL (via libjxl);
  • PNG (via libpng);
  • GIF (via giflib);
  • SVG (via librsvg);
  • WebP (via libwebp);
  • HEIF/AVIF (via libheif);
  • AV1F/AVIFS (via libavif);
  • TIFF (via libtiff);
  • EXR (via OpenEXR);
  • BMP (built-in);
  • PNM (built-in);
  • TGA (built-in);
  • QOI (built-in).
• Fully customizable keyboard bindings, colors, and many other parameters;
• Loading images from files and pipes;
• Gallery and viewer modes with slideshow and animation support;
• Preload images in a separate thread;
• Cache in memory, no data is written to permanent storage (HDD/SSD);
• Sway integration mode: the application creates an "overlay" above the currently active window, which gives the illusion that you are opening the image directly in a terminal window.

Usage

swayimg [OPTIONS]... [FILE]...

See man swayimg for details.

Examples:

• View multiple files:

  swayimg photo.jpg logo.png
  

• Start slideshow for all files (recursively) in the current directory in random order:

  swayimg --slideshow --recursive --order=random
  

• View using pipes:

  wget -qO- https://www.kernel.org/theme/images/logos/tux.png | swayimg -
  

• Loading stdout from external commands:

  swayimg "exec://wget -qO- https://www.kernel.org/theme/images/logos/tux.png" \
          "exec://curl -so- https://www.kernel.org/theme/images/logos/tux.png"
  

• View all images from the current directory in gallery mode:

  swayimg --gallery
  

Configuration

The viewer searches for the configuration file with name config in the following directories:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/swayimg
• $HOME/.config/swayimg
• $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/swayimg
• /etc/xdg/swayimg

Sample file is available here or locally /usr/share/swayimg/swayimgrc.

See man swayimgrc for details.

Install

List of supported distributives can be found on the Repology page.

Arch users can install the program from the extra repository: swayimg or from AUR swayimg-git package.

Build

The project uses Meson build system:

meson setup _build_dir
meson compile -C _build_dir
meson install -C _build_dir