Perch

perch is a small native Wayland image viewer for keeping reference images on screen. It uses one resident daemon for any number of independent windows. Your compositor must support xdg-shell v4 and viewporter.

Controls

• Left drag: move the window
• Mouse wheel: resize the window
• Right click or Q: close the window
• Left/right arrows: previous/next image, hold to repeat
• Space: play or pause animation
• Tab: toggle inspection, where left drag pans and the wheel zooms
• Home: fit the image
• End: show at original size

Usage

Start the daemon once:

perch --daemon

Then open one or more images:

perch image.png another.webp

Or pipe an image through standard input:

cat image.png | perch --stdin

Perch loads images in the background and keeps one next decoded image up to 64 MiB. Animation is opt-in. Input, decoding and playback have no memory cap. Temporary render regions remain bounded, and each pixel buffer must fit Wayland's 2 GiB limit. Large images stay within the window when showing original size, with inspection enabled for panning.

Supported TIFFs read the visible tiles or strips and can use reduced-resolution images in the main directory chain or SubIFDs. Large TIFFs without an overview build a fitted preview. Large PNGs stream scanlines into a preview and rescan for detail. JPEG and static WebP use reduced previews and decode regions when zoomed. Other formats can still decode the whole image, and some codecs require workspace that grows with image size. Piped input uses temporary storage.

Nix

Add Perch to your flake inputs:

inputs.perch.url = "github:greyxp1/perch";

Import and enable the module in your NixOS or Home Manager configuration:

{inputs, ...}: {
  # Use homeModules.default for Home Manager.
  imports = [inputs.perch.nixosModules.default];
  programs.perch.enable = true;
}