Neo (or New or Not) Simple (or Small or Suckless) X Image Viewer

nsxiv is a fork of now unmaintained sxiv with the purpose of maintaining it and adding simple, sensible features. nsxiv is free software licensed under GPLv2 and aims to be easy to modify and customize.

Please file a bug report if something does not work as documented or expected in this repository, after making sure you are using the latest release of nsxiv. Contributions are welcome, see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Features

• Basic image operations, e.g. zooming, panning, rotating
• Customizable key and mouse button mappings (in config.h)
• Thumbnail mode: grid of selectable previews of all images
• Ability to cache thumbnails for fast re-loading
• Basic support for multi-frame images
• Play GIF animations
• Display image information in status bar
• Display image name/path in X title

Screenshots

Image mode: (Default colors)

Thumbnail mode: (Custom colors)

Dependencies

nsxiv requires the following software to be installed:

• Imlib2
• X11

The following dependencies are optional.

• inotify : Used for auto-reloading images on change. Disabled via HAVE_INOTIFY=0
• libXft, freetype2, fontconfig : Used for the status bar. Disabled via HAVE_LIBFONTS=0
• giflib : Used for animated gif playback. Disabled via HAVE_LIBGIF=0.
• libexif : Used for auto-orientation and exif thumbnails. Disable via HAVE_LIBEXIF=0
• libwebp : Used for animated webp playback. Disabled via HAVE_LIBWEBP=0.

Please make sure to install the corresponding development packages in case that you want to build nsxiv on a distribution with separate runtime and development packages (e.g. *-dev on Debian).

Building

nsxiv is built using the commands:

$ make

You can pass HAVE_X=0 to make to disable an optional dependency. For example:

$ make HAVE_LIBEXIF=0

will disable libexif support. Alternatively they can be disabled via editing the Makefile directly. OPT_DEP_DEFAULT=0 can be used to disable all optional dependencies.

Installing nsxiv:

# make install

Installing desktop entry:

# make install-desktop

Installing icons:

# make install-icon

Installing all of the above:

# make install-all

Please note, that these requires root privileges. By default, nsxiv is installed using the prefix /usr/local, so the full path of the executable will be /usr/local/bin/nsxiv, the .desktop entry will be /usr/local/share/applications/nsxiv.desktop and the icon path will be /usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/{size}/apps/nsxiv.png.

You can install nsxiv into a directory of your choice by changing this command to:

$ make PREFIX="/your/dir" install

Example scripts are installed using EGPREFIX which defaults to /usr/local/share/doc/nsxiv/examples. You can change EGPREFIX the same way you can change PREFIX shown above.

The build-time specific settings of nsxiv can be found in the file config.h. Please check and change them, so that they fit your needs. If the file config.h does not already exist, then you have to create it with the following command:

$ make config.h

Usage

Please see man page for information on how to use nsxiv. To do so, execute the following after the installation:

$ man nsxiv

F.A.Q

• Can I open remote urls with nsxiv?
  Yes, see nsxiv-url

• Can I open all the images in a directory?
  Yes, see nsxiv-rifle

• Can I set default arguments for nsxiv?
  Yes, see nsxiv-env

• Can I pipe images into nsxiv?
  No, not yet. See #32

User patches

Due to our limited project scope, certain features or customization cannot be merged into nsxiv mainline. Following the spirit of suckless software, we host the nsxiv-extra repo where users are free to submit whatever patches or scripts they wish.

Description on how to use or submit patches can be found on nsxiv-extra's README.

Download

You can browse the source code repository on GitHub or get a copy using git with the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/nsxiv/nsxiv.git

You can view the changelog here