cbzr

Terminal comic reader for .cbz and .cbr. Two books side by side, vim keys, images drawn in the terminal, optional browser hand-off.

cbzr book.cbz             one book
cbzr one.cbz two.cbr      split screen
cbzr                      file picker
cbzr -renderer=halfblock  force the fallback renderer

Build

go build -o cbzr .

Requires Go 1.26+. For OCR search, install tesseract (brew install tesseract / apt install tesseract-ocr).

Formats

• .cbz/.zip and .cbr/.rar. Format is detected by signature, so mislabeled archives (a rar named .cbz) still open.
• Pages sort in natural order (p2 before p10) regardless of archive order.
• Page images: jpeg, png, gif, webp, bmp.

Rendering

Follows yazi's adapter idea: probe the terminal, pick the best backend.

• kitty: kitty graphics protocol with Unicode placeholders (U=1). Images are transmitted out of band; the TUI only prints placeholder cells, so bubbletea repaints and split-screen joins work without clipping regions. Used on kitty and ghostty. Under tmux, cbzr detects the outer terminal, enables allow-passthrough (tmux >= 3.3), and probes the cell pixel size via XTWINOPS, so pages stay sharp instead of falling back to half blocks.
• halfblock: U+2580 with truecolor fg/bg, two pixels per cell. Works in any 24-bit terminal.

Keys

key	action
j / k	next / prev page (counts: 5j)
g / G	first / last page (42G → page 42)
w	switch pane
v	toggle split (keeps active pane)
s	two-page spread: pages N and N+1 side by side (single pane)
tab	chapter menu (ComicInfo.xml bookmarks or archive folders)
b	toggle bookmark on this page
F	bookmarks menu (persisted in the user config dir)
/ in menus	fuzzy filter (subsequence match)
r / d in bookmarks	rename / delete mark
S	screenshot page to PNG (CBZR_SHOT_DIR or cwd)
R	rotate 90° cw
+ / - / 0	zoom in / out / reset
arrows	pan while zoomed
/	OCR search via tesseract (CBZR_OCR_LANG, default eng)
n / p	next / prev search hit
o / O	open file in pane / in split
x	close pane
e	open current book in browser
r	re-render
?	help
q	quit

Mouse: wheel turns pages in the pane under the cursor, click focuses a pane.

OCR search scans pages in the background and caches results; n/p jump between hits and wrap.

Browser

e binds 127.0.0.1 on a random port in 50000-59999 and opens the current book at the current page. The web reader has the same h/l/g/G keys. / lists both open books.