Imgcat

Display images and gifs in your terminal emulator.

Features

• Animated GIF support
• Accept media through stdin
• Transparency

Installation

MacOS

brew install danielgatis/imgcat/imgcat

Windows

First, install scoop.

scoop bucket add scoop-imgcat https://github.com/danielgatis/scoop-imgcat.git
scoop install scoop-imgcat/imgcat

Download binaries

Alternatively, you can download a pre-built binary here.

Build from source

First, install Go.

Next, fetch and build the binary.

go install github.com/danielgatis/imgcat@latest

or, if you use pre-1.17 Go version, use the go get command:

go get -u github.com/danielgatis/imgcat

Usage

Display a remote image

curl -s http://input.png | imgcat

Display a local image

imgcat path/to/image.png

Options

• -h, -help: Show help message
• -interpolation: Set interpolation method (default: lanczos)
  • nearest: Fastest resampling filter, no antialiasing.
  • lanczos: A high-quality resampling filter for photographic images yielding sharp results.
• -type: Image resize type. Options: fit, resize (default: fit)
• -cols: Number of terminal columns to use for rendering the image (default: terminal width)
• -rows: Number of terminal rows to use for rendering the image (default: terminal height)
• -top-offset: Offset from the top of the terminal to start rendering the image (default: 1)
• -silent: Hide exit message (default: false)

Requirements

Your terminal emulator must be support true color and use a monospaced font that includes the lower half block unicode character (▄ U+2584).

Checking truecolor support

Run the following command to verify if your terminal supports 24-bit color:

echo $COLORTERM

The output should be truecolor or 24bit. If it is empty or shows 256color, imgcat output will appear garbled or incorrect.

Using inside tmux

tmux does not forward truecolor by default. Add the following lines to your ~/.tmux.conf:

set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color"
set -ga terminal-overrides ",*:Tc"

Then restart tmux or reload the config with tmux source ~/.tmux.conf.

Using inside screen

GNU Screen has limited truecolor support. Start it with:

screen -T xterm-truecolor

Or add the following to your ~/.screenrc:

term xterm-truecolor

Note: older versions of screen may still not render colors correctly even with this setting. Upgrading to screen 4.6+ or switching to tmux is recommended.

License

Copyright (c) 2020-present Daniel Gatis

Licensed under MIT License

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