sxiv: The Suckless Image Viewer for GNU/Linux

OFFICIAL WEBSITE: lukesmith.xyz 🌐❓🔎
DONATE NOW: lukesmith.xyz/support 💰😎👌💯

[@alessandroceloria]

"Angle brackets will rotate it by 50 degrees" ~ Luke Smith, 2019 "I haven't thought of a particular use for this yet, but I just know it's very useful" ~ Also Luke Smith, 2019

[@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx]

Do you guys have the full list of Luke Smith quote ?!

[@alessandroceloria]

@@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx We should create one

[@marksmod]

@@alessandroceloria yess

[@heartlessalice5801]

Let's open a git repository ^^

[@alessandroceloria]

@@heartlessalice5801 Good idea, we should also create a dmenu script with the most famous Luke Smith quotes and make a pull request to the larbs repo 😂

[@robinmoussu]

I never though I was going one day to watch a 11mn video about a basic image viewer, but this one is absolutely awesome.

[@avocado4877]

2:01 "for example angled brackets will rotate it by 50 degrees"

[@LukeSmithxyz]

My apologies, I think in base 18.

[@gery49]

​@@LukeSmithxyz flawless comeback :D

[@Matt-of1iq]

@@DetectiveAndrey Yes.

[@bruno1807]

@@DetectiveAndrey 5 times X = 90... Solve for X and there's your mistic base

[@edvonrattlehead2135]

Base 18 is twice base 9, luke is human cirno confirmed

[@FEE1DEAD]

highly extensible is just an euphemism for 'supports bloating'

[@hammer158]

The true way

[@sandikodev]

so bloated .. awokwowkowk

[@santiagolerin]

Like emacs

[@zaccstacc4568]

b l o a t

[@daveshouldaine2520]

although st is very minimalistic, you can bloat it

[@TehKorwinMikke]

Hmm, . You got emacs'd.

[@miyalys]

It's default, and unfortunately can't be changed to a different, shorter .

[@gayusschwulius8490]

@D M Fuck emacs, vim master race

[@splishysploshy7840]

@@miyalys you can edit the config.h

[@Flackon]

“This will eternally switch it” *4 secs later, back as it was before*

[@DigitalMetal]

I use to spend time looking for programs like this, now I have you Luke, so I don't have to search any more.

[@surajkushwah3221]

So many years .. so many good videos. Luke Motivated me but you actually taught me how to use bash. Still so underrated. Make some cool high quality videos.. YOU deserve more. You are one of the best linux youtuber according to me.

[@magnusanderson6681]

@@surajkushwah3221 Wait till you learn about speedy more-posix-compliant-dash (jk, I too only realized how powerful pipes are when he introduced me to dmenu and suckless in general and other good-at-one-thing minimal programs)

[@mkd1113]

I always pronounce it "six-four", since we have sx (six) and iv (four).

[@marksmod]

Or like 'excessive' without the 'e' at the beginning.

[@sgky2k]

M. Otto more like esexcive.

[@MrBiky]

sexyV sounds better.

[@elbroder995]

Yes, but the question is... can i slideshow my favorite anime girls with this?

[@LukeSmithxyz]

Slideshow mode with -S: sxiv -f -S 3 waifus/* The argument 3 is the seconds on each slide.

[@oddbob6230]

Remember: he doesn't condone anime. :^)

[@mcechss]

If you are already in sxiv opened with multiple images, you can press for example 3s to start the slideshow with 3 seconds of delay between images (or any other number of course)

[@jonnykopp]

sxiv -to waifus/* | sxiv -fi -S 3 If you're feeling picky that day

[@redgeoblaze3752]

I think I just found my new best image viewer. it's got a lot of features I need, but expected to be labeled as Bloat by suckless. I like how if you just specify a folder, it only takes files in that folder, but if you put the * at the end, it works recursively. Perfect for the kind of folders I'm going to be using it for.

[@ferreus]

joke: watching luke smith to learn stuff woke: watch luke smith for the meme surprises

[@dmccowan2]

Thank you for posting this. I immediately installed sxiv and started using. Right now I in the middle of a project that requires manual cropping of many images and feh was starting to drive me a little nuts. The keybindings of sxiv seems so natural and easy. Again thank you.

[@thescrawl6594]

This is amazing. precisely what I needed for managing my wallpapers/memes, been stuck using bloated gui file explorers for far too long. Thanks for this!

[@ms77grz]

Only now I've started to understand the whole let's say vim conception in ranger, now in sxiv. I really love that! TVM Luke! You do a fantastic useful and powerful vids. And sorry for my English)

[@ice-rv7tz]

I've been looking for essentially dmenu for images and when you said exactly that I cannot tell you how happy I was

Allow to select images from the current directory (in this example, though it can be other directory name than ".", for sure) and create a tar.bz2 archive from the selected images in command line: sxiv -to . | tar cfvj /tmp/pictures.tar.bz2 -T - Note: I prefer "sxiv ." over "sxiv *.jpg" for example. The second one only considers files matching the *.jpg shell pattern, whole giving a directory name seems to allow sxiv to consider all kind of file names can be an image. And indeed, I can have different kind of images, like *.png, *.jpg, *.gif ....

[@ChungusAm0ngus]

Been using sxiv for a while. Informative video, I didn't even know about the ctrl+x commands!

[@user-lk2vo8fo2q]

10:00 one use for the "dmenu-like" mode would perhaps be to "embed" images from your editor. the first case that comes to mind is email w/ mutt. the default attachment UI is perfectly fine for regular files but it isn't ideal for images. it defaults to creating a MIME attachment, but for html email you'd often want an inline embed. also, sxiv's interface for selecting/previewing images is probably better than your default file manager's (especially if you use a tui file manager, and especially especially if you don't have terminal framebuffer rendering set up). this isn't limited to email though, something like this could help any time you're writing some markup language in vim: LaTeX, markdown, html/xml.. in the latter case you could even automatically base64 encode the image so that it's truly embedded in the file instead of being a reference to another file.

[@FeinesFabi]

Select all images containing traffic lights...

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Thanks, Luke! Been looking for a good alternative to feh for a while now, since it's kind of tedious to configure.

[@donabdo1076]

Hello Hello, Fake Linux user is here XD

[@ertwro]

Been using it since gobletu's video. Edit: Forgot to mention, you can't set background with sxiv but you can do it with imagemagic and the key handler e.g.: display -size 1920x1200 -window root ~/images/wallpapers/Logh.jpg I use sxiv with surf browser inside emacs to preview heavy weight sites.

[@bitnatures]

I thought sxiv supported WID so you could set it as the root window on startup. This is what I did for mpv for a video wallpaper.

[@ertwro]

@@bitnatures Yeah, with "-e" although is not great. That´s another option if one doesn´t want a third party application to set the wallpaper or use something like imlibsetroot or hsetroot.

[@dustnoiseplays]

Thank you m8.

[@wonderingwhy6410]

This was exactly what I wanted: Vim key bindings, multiple images view and being able to pipe the file names. The other features are great too.

[@MyurrDurr]

"50 degrees" - Luke Smith - Talking about rotating images 90 degrees This is a great image viewer and your new monitor is amazing :DD

[@LukeSmithxyz]

When you're in front of an audience your IQ drops by at least 30 points.

[@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx]

@@LukeSmithxyz 100% ture

[@Echo-te1sf]

@@LukeSmithxyz You meant 40. 😉

[@dorukhan8707]

@@Echo-te1sf big brain 🧠 ✊

[@Discordianism]

Who needs images when we have text???

[@DistroTube]

^ This guy gets it!

[@alessandroceloria]

But why have text when we have Morse code!

[@pigboiii]

Who needs text when we have raw binary?

[@alessandroceloria]

@@pigboiii Who needs raw binary when we hav- oh wait

[@pigboiii]

@@alessandroceloria raw electrical signals applied directly to your brain

[@olespankiv9701]

That is a very cool video. I'm very motivated right now to start rising my i3 config. Thank you, Luke!

[@andrewpalm2103]

At Derek Taylor's mention, I also have switched from ranger to vifm and as a result discovered sxiv. I have a custom command in vifm to open a selected set of image files in thumbnail mode. I like this just fine, although the ranger preview is pretty great.

[@neonfuz_]

Been using this since forever, surprised you just now started using it. Great program.

[@fms6306]

thanks luke. this is a great recommendation. now i can use this to convert image files to webp and move them to appropriate folder.

[@Yaxqb]

U could make a couple of manipulations on an input image with imagemagick, display the results in sxiv and then save the selected images. Experimenting with images is going to be a lot more productive😍

[@eboubaker3722]

Image glass is also an open sourve lightweight image viewer comes with helping utilities

[@niema6139]

Using this "very useful feature" maybe you can create a script that will let you select images and then you will by prompted for example by dmenu that will ask for image-magick command that will be applied to every image, if don't what to specify raw command you can make dmenu to display some often used options for resizing, changing colors

[@BurhanDanger]

Have been using this for quite a while. Good image viewer. 9:55 that's really interesting.

[@ProXicT]

In i3, or perhaps also in other WMs/DEs, the desktop wallpaper is just a root window of Xorg. There is a utility called "xsetbg" which can set the root window picture - set a wallpaper.

[@TheLoneBrick]

For the "dmenu" feature, for a slideshow wallpaper one could create a cronjob that sets the wallpaper to one of the files listed in a file, and then the user can select which images to put in that file using sxiv.

[@balabunat]

Happy New Year, Luke 👍

[@cmatthew91]

if the selected picture is 'tree.png' in the home folder, $file will be './tree.png', and $fullpath in your implementation will be '~/./tree.png', which is a kinda useless string. I'd recommend to use ${file#./} when piping it to xclip, and fullpath to be $(pwd)/${file#./}

[@DistroTube]

I see you are using vifm. I've switched over to vifm as well. A great file manager. There are even a couple of hacks that will get you icons in vifm similar to ranger, and a hack that will get w3m image previews to work.

[@LukeSmithxyz]

Yeah I've played around with the w3m image previews, but they don't work very well at all on my terminal build. One of the reasons I started using sxiv is specifically to get the thumbnail view to replace the ranger functionality. I don't know if you've tried using tabbed or another tab manager (I haven't gotten it working to my specifications), but you can have an instance of sxiv pop up in your vifm window, etc.

[@sharktamer]

​@@LukeSmithxyz use uberzug github.com/seebye/ueberzug . I always had problems with w3m image preview with ranger in st, but it works flawlessly now.

[@ertwro]

@@sharktamer Holly crap, what kind of sorcery is this one? nice.

[@eklebanow]

@@sharktamer please explain how uberzug allows improved image previews in ranger via st

[@sharktamer]

@@eklebanow nah

[@joseluisgerman1906]

You can run sxiv and select some images, and then have names of the selected images output to stdout and | pipe them to pywal to set the background image.

[@MelvilleG]

A very badass way to view pictures.

[@timh.6872]

I think that "dmenu-style" behavior would be useful for a graphical launcher on, say, a touchscreen device. Read off the *.desktop files in the user's home directory to find the list of "icons", show by sxiv, and use the results to exec.

[@crwmike0]

Looks good, I'll have to look into setting up a keybinding to open the current image in GIMP. EDIT: found it in your key-handler file.

[@ricardo.mazeto]

If you have a folder full of images you want to sort out and organize into other folders, you can have a custom command mvpics, and select the images with sxiv.

[@oleksiikhramov3706]

Due to lockdown, I have all of my exams online. And I have a usecase. I'm a CS student and I have to go through a bunch of exams where I have to write down math formulas. So, using convert and sxiv i can easily build PDF from images I want. Noice, thanks

[@mikemendes8539]

Thanks again Luke!

[@BasedMan14]

2:00 "Angle brackets will rotate it by *fifty degrees* "

[@lisasmith-cr4mr]

yes that sxiv as a dmenu for images is awesome.

[@lisasmith-cr4mr]

feh has those options too. feh --montage will give you a thumbnail view feh -A "command %f" for running commands on images

[@tsebeengalzuud2416]

it's not even close to what you can do with sxiv

[@lcf893]

Use esetroot for wallpaper. Comes in at 40k - uses imlib2 which is quite big but is the same library that sxiv uses.

[@angelcaru]

Mouse: *exists* Luke: We don't do that here

[@yoshi314]

been using sxiv for a year, and i am very happy with it.

[@airilsra]

Luke, what do you think of stacking mode and tabbed mode on i3? I've never seen you use them on your videos.

[@olablt]

7:43 is this the new best file manager - vifm? how is it compared to nnn and ranger?

[@gimcrack555]

This is the one I switch to as well. Even works great in ranger.

[@jarkkokorhonen6520]

Thanks for this!

[@tigerfish66]

oh yes lovin this

[@thepuzzlemaster64]

A bit of a late comment, but one idea that I have for scripting with sxiv is a game menu. Have a folder with only pictures of the games, a file that keeps track of what commands to use to launch the game, and a folder containing the games themselves. You could then tell sxiv to pick an image, pipe the output to grep or something to find the matching name in the file, then pipe that as a command to start the game.

[@Vlad-1986]

You can do a script who uses the standard output with feh, xsetroot or anything similar to change the background by sending the filename and file path as arguments.

[@punkrockllama]

I am not too familiar with the terminal based image stacking program (for doing astrophotography) but I am sure that -tio option would be very useful for that. Does it handle raw image format, or would that have to be added?

[@RoyBrush]

If anybody is looking for an easier name for this thing, you could interpret the name as a number in roman numerals. If you do that, you could refer to this image viewer simply as "7" if you wanted, because in roman numerals S is used as 1/2 (particularly in a pharmaceutical context) and XIV = 14, so 1/2 of 14 is 7. Of course, you could just use this idea for inspiration if the number 7 isn't unique enough for a name, you could call it "Half 14", or whatever.

[@fluffy_tail4365]

To set background you can use nitrogen or one of the *setroot programs. I think that you can even set any window as the root window, so you could just use a fullscreen fit-to sxiv instance, but I don't remeber the name of the utility that does that

[@yash1152]

what is the difference between set background and set wallpaper?

[@AaronBonBarron]

I love the fit to heighth option

[@porky1118]

After 4:30 I'm already convinced to use this now instead. My previous image viewer didn't have this preview mode.

[@theguitarguru1]

Use for -tio function: Select thumbnail of a movie and play the associated movie. Like netflix only local.

[@cla041054]

your i3 setup is very clean and beautiful

[@MarcCastellsBallesta]

Wow!

[@MrSunka]

2:54 "Automate automatically" i guess animate

[@10zane10]

For the key-handeler script use 'read -r file' instead of 'read file'. Otherwise the script will not work as intended for any file with a backslash in it. Hello\.png will be treated as Hello.png Also some shell autism: consider replacing $fullpath with "$PWD/$file". Running $(pwd) is somewhat expensive compared to $PWD.

[@LukeSmithxyz]

Oh yeah I guess you're right about PWD. Although anyone who puts slashes in filenames seriously deserves the errors.

[@cmatthew91]

I used your your wallpaper repo to play with sxiv, and after some xclipping I have a question. Why do you pipe the filename to the clipboard buffer, why not to the primary (default) one? You have a lot of spaces in the filenames.

[@glpzzzdev]

Hey Luke. I'm rewatching this video and it let me to think. Is there a patch to make the background of the viewer transparent? An alpha patch as it exists for st and dwm. I'm not talking about the checkerboard for transparent areas on the pic, but the windows itself. Would be very cool! Thanks for the content and stay safe!

[@AcceleratingUniverse]

9:55 rather than piping the files into something boring like ls, you could pipe a bunch of files into GIMP or some other image editor. I hate trying to find all the images I need in the floating filesystem window with no previews.

[@0babul0]

EDIT: Nevermind, you explained it in the end, I just gotta learn how to insert each line of the output as a variable. Great stuff! Do you know if there's any way to do stuff like appending two files together? I can see only $file in the config, so I assume the usage of $file is limited (you can't just use convert +append $file $file output.jpg, can you?). Would be nice if you could use $fileX, first file being whatever is shown first in thumbnail mode or something.

[@JackPowellD]

It's that simple you gotta remember all the keyboard bindings and terminal commands.

[@magnusanderson6681]

Just git gud lol

[@altEFG]

Luke, how many of the email you get during your videos are from India?

[@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx]

Luke start make suckless programs dance together. NOW I know why unix philosophy is awesome, and why suckless people make their programs like that.... I'm looking for luke use dwm in future, even if he do it on one of his old un-used thinkpad

[@cunningham.s_law]

well well well

[@AhmedKhaled-sj1zx]

@yarn rav hell yeah.

[@MaidLucy]

that's great but another really good program that binds me to xorg. have you ever tried wayland btw? there are things like swaywm which is basically i3 for wayland.

[@djosephsss]

in the arch wiki on sxiv wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/sxiv there is a guide to bind sxiv to make it generate a wallpaper with nitrogen, could easily do something similar

[@InNominePraxis]

sxiv doesn't come with a xinerama USE flag, so even if it does handle setting wallpapers I imagine it won't play nice with setting dual monitor wallpapers

[@dontwanttousemyrealnametol6765]

I'm sure you could hook thumbnail selection into ranger's file selection (and vice versa?).

[@nichtgestalt]

sxiv as some sort of menu? Sounds like a perfect opportunity to use it with pywal or something. The thumbnail mode is way more comfy than a dmenu or rofi prompt.

[@xxJoshwa]

Which bash theme are you using Luke? I can't seem to find it anywhere, and I don't see it listed in your .bashrc. I assumed it was an oh my bash theme.

[@xTHETRINCHOx]

WOOOOOW

[@CostaKazistov]

5:59 "Let's sed-eleven-queue it" Haha!! I'm going to borrow that.

[@tiberiusvetus9113]

Luke - what do you think of sway / wayland?

[@wild1729]

nice vifm lukey

[@lowyzhang8071]

Don't wanna use sxiv, but i like the config file with the feh. Thx!

[@user-ic7cj8lq9z]

I don't think sxiv is able to set X11 background. I don't think it would take that long to implement if someone had the time and skill. But I think its good to have a different program to set the background, It makes the image viewer that little bit less bloated, it is already much lighter than feh

[@gatterlinux8426]

try hsetroot is smaller then feh and just a background setter thats it

[@quiquecrz6451]

trying to integrate sxiv with nnn. any tip for Linux noobs? Information on the GitHub readme is too vague. thanks

[@kevinison3740]

Excellant video... btw what is the name of the wallpaper at the start of the video?

[@michalski9141]

automate automatically -Luke Smith

[@tc40390]

And no, sxiv is not able to set the wallpaper on its own, but you could always use nitrogen and do the following: # nitrogen --save --set-zoom-fill "/path/to/file.png"

[@redgeoblaze3752]

I think I'm just going to call it "S-Fourteen" to make it easier to pronounce. I know they're not roman numerals, but it makes it easier to remember regardless.

[@salmanabedin1313]

You can run scripts on feh by using the action flag. Here is how I do it. ... setsid feh -F -A "setBg %f" -B "black" -d --edit --keep-zoom-vp --start-at ... Notice how I run my setBg script after the Action flag. This lets me set a picture I like as my wallpaper by pressing 0/Enter as I am browsing through a directory of pictures.

[@Vulto166]

I still din't know how to make sxiv change the wallpaper too... Edit: Now i'm using hsetroot instead feh. It replace xsetroot and feh, plus set background.

[@Gpurezza]

how do i copy the marked images (the path+filename not the image itself) to my clipboard?

[@nykal1510]

If anyone comes across this comment, use xwallpaper if you need a wallpaper and don't want feh. It's like a couple KB and it's in the Arch repos

[@DonEdward]

Do you share your amazing wallpapers anywhere?

[@siddharthvipul]

I am sure I saw your name in Casey Neistat note 9 giveaway. Was it other Luke Smith? Or you declined it 😂

[@yash1152]

what is the difference between set background and set wallpaper?

[@greob]

Can't you just use the script to bind a key combo to use hsetroot in order to set the file as wallpaper?