The Best Image Viewer

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Published on: Wednesday 23 April 2025 10:27:42 AM IST

Introduction

A couple of days ago, by that I mean yesterday, I came across sxiv, a very cool image viewer. I started using it simply as an image viewer, it has VI keybindings and is super fast. Then I decided to write a shell script to use it to set my wallpapers, permanently replacing the rofi wallpaper picker I stole from JaKoolit.

Nsxiv

Then I went on into the Arch Wiki to read more about this, that's when I realized it was unmaintained :( and the maintained fork was nsxiv, so I installed it and it functions the same. I'm gonna be using this based image viewer for all sorts of things, and I want to point out some cool features of it:

Thumbnail Mode

This is a pretty cool feature to browse your images in a certain directory, sort of like a gallery. This is also how I wrote my wallpaper picker.

VI Keybindings

I already mentioned this, but you can use J or K to scroll, H and L to horizontally scroll, just like good ol' Vim or Evil Mode, as us members of the dark side say.

That's all I know

I haven't explored much about it, but this is awesome and everybody should use this instead of gthumb or nomacs or some sort of that crap.