XV rocks [LWN.net]

XV rocks

Posted Mar 23, 2004 23:08 UTC (Tue) by amtota (subscriber, #4012)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

And I thought I was the only one still using xv!

xv is plain and simple, and that's how I like it.

to post comments

XV rocks

Posted Mar 23, 2004 23:30 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

I have also had a fondness for xv going back a long time; it's a well-designed program, and I've been looking around for a decent free replacement for some time. Of the free programs, I like gthumb the best; there are some things that gthumb does better than xv (particularly the fullscreen and slide show modes). xv still wins for its quick image-editing operations and its ability to delete files. It's one of the few things keeping me out of Stallman's Church of Emacs (that and the Macromedia Flash viewer, which my six-year-old can't live without, since she loves the games on the Nick Junior site).

One feature neither gthumb nor xv have is a drag-and-drop that will let me easily select a picture and attach it to an email message. As gthumb is a Gnome program, I expected this to Just Work.

XV rocks

Posted Mar 23, 2004 23:39 UTC (Tue) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (14 responses)

Ditto. I've actually patched my XV to fix the two annoyances I've had:

Sped up smoothing by tweaking the fixed point arithmetic, trading a "/100" with ">>7".
Added some "memory" to the Visual Schnauzer, so that when I'm going through trees of folders (I'm an organization freak sometimes), the cursor doesn't go back to the top of the list. Makes it really easy to recurse through a massive hierarchy.

Perhaps I should dig up those patches and post them somewhere.

XV rocks

Posted Mar 24, 2004 0:32 UTC (Wed) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (3 responses)

If you are taking requests I'd also like:

1) The file selection dialog to be resizable (at least vertically).

2) The text widget to accept clicks in the middle of the text and move the
insertion bar there rather than to the end of the text.

3) Support for 16 bit PPMs.

4) Dithering support in 16 and 24 bpp mode.

XV rocks

Posted Mar 24, 2004 6:43 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Uh, no. I'm not taking requests... But thanks for asking! I really don't know my way around XV's internals. The places I edited really were pretty isolated. The visual schnauzer stuff seemed pretty crufty to me, and I'm surprised what edits I made actually worked!

XV rocks

Posted Mar 24, 2004 20:03 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (1 responses)

If you are taking requests I'd also like:
1) The file selection dialog to be resizable (at least vertically).
2) The text widget to accept clicks in the middle of the text and move the
insertion bar there rather than to the end of the text.
3) Support for 16 bit PPMs.

4) Dithering support in 16 and 24 bpp mode.

Amen to (2); that's the one that drives me the most crazy. 16-bit PPM support (3) is as trivial as compiling PBMPLUS/NetPBM that way (although you'll still be limited to the internal 8-bps depth). Dithering support (4) already exists; look for Guido Volbeding's (I think) fixpix patch.

Greg

P.S. One of my favorite features: [pbm junk] | xv - (the command line rocks, too!). And the fact that it uses its own widget set means you don't have the dependency hell that so often accompanies GTK+, Qt/KDE, etc. Maybe I'm the only one who likes to drag along the same binary from distro to distro without constantly recompiling the damned thing...

16 bit PPMs

Posted Mar 26, 2004 18:19 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

as trivial as compiling PBMPLUS/NetPBM that way

If you use current Netpbm this is not a compilation option; it always handles both 8 bit and 16 bit PPMs.

But I suspect xv doesn't use the Pbmplus/Netpbm libraries. Most programs don't -- they just interpret the PPM format (or, usually, some subset of the PPM format) with private code.

XV rocks

Posted Mar 24, 2004 19:51 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (9 responses)

Ditto. I've actually patched my XV to fix the two annoyances I've had:

Sped up smoothing by tweaking the fixed point arithmetic, trading a "/100" with ">>7".
Added some "memory" to the Visual Schnauzer, so that when I'm going through trees of folders (I'm an organization freak sometimes), the cursor doesn't go back to the top of the list. Makes it really easy to recurse through a massive hierarchy.
Perhaps I should dig up those patches and post them somewhere.

Please do! About four years ago I put together almost all of the XV patches--including several of my own--into a pair of "jumbo" patches (one for fixes, one for enhancements), but since there were a couple of mine I didn't have time to finish (transparency stuff for TIFF and XPM), I never posted them. But maybe it's time I did so... (And who knows, maybe it would inspire John to get off his butt and release an update. One could say the same for Jef Poskanzer, too, of course, but I digress...)

Anyway, feel free to shoot your patches my way (newt at pobox dot com eh? or just check the PNG home site) and I'll see what I can do in the next few weeks.

Greg Roelofs

XV rocks

Posted Mar 24, 2004 21:55 UTC (Wed) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (2 responses)

Is there a patch to fix the problem where XV pulls up new windows in another
part of the virtual desktop? This may be specific to tvtwm. Basically it
will open a new window in the bottom left of the desktop if you are in the
upper left and vice versa. Very annoying but I forgot to mention it in my
"wishlist" above.

XV rocks

Posted Mar 25, 2004 6:18 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (1 responses)

Is there a patch to fix the problem where XV pulls up new windows in another part of the virtual desktop? This may be specific to tvtwm. Basically it will open a new window in the bottom left of the desktop if you are in the upper left and vice versa.

Do you mean all of its new windows or only specific ones? By default, it puts the info window ("i") in the upper right corner, the color editor ("e") in the lower left corner, the schnauzer in the lower right corner, and the main control window (right-click) and set-size window ("S") more or less where the image is. It seems to be completely consistent to me, and I'm pretty sure there's some .Xdefaults setting to move them somewhere else, but I haven't ever bothered to look.

If tvtwm is putting the same window in different places at different times, it's probably overriding the application's requested position. I use fvwm, FWIW.

Greg

XV rocks

Posted Mar 25, 2004 7:24 UTC (Thu) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link]

Ah, that's probably what it is. That algorithm makes sense for a single
screen, but not an entire desktop. I guess it is querying the size of
the root window instead of the size of the screen. That should be easy
enough to fix that I might do it myself.

XV rocks

Posted Mar 25, 2004 1:36 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (2 responses)

Hey Greg,

The XV patches should show up here:

Enjoy,

--Joe

XV rocks

Posted Mar 25, 2004 4:11 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

Your faster-smooth.patch link is broken.
I think it should be http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/faster-smooth.patch

XV rocks

Posted Mar 26, 2004 5:32 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Yup. My bad. Thanks.

XV jumbo patches

Posted May 23, 2004 21:17 UTC (Sun) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (2 responses)

I wrote:

About four years ago I put together almost all of the XV patches--including several of my own--into a pair of "jumbo" patches (one for fixes, one for enhancements), but since there were a couple of mine I didn't have time to finish (transparency stuff for TIFF and XPM), I never posted them. But maybe it's time I did so...

Well, it took a while, but if anyone's still listening, you can find the updated jumbo patches here:

http://pobox.com/~newt/greg_xv.html

The current release (20040523) incorporates 25 fix-patches and 21 enhancement-patches, although one could argue about the categorization in a few cases. Anyway, the jumbo fixes-patch applies to stock 3.10a, and the jumbo enhancements-patch applies to the result. No muss, no fuss...gotta love it.

I may do one or two more releases later this summer, but no promises on that.

Greg

XV jumbo patches

Posted Jul 19, 2004 0:59 UTC (Mon) by anthony (guest, #23137) [Link] (1 responses)

I also have patched by XV but to increase the size of thumbnails in the Visual Schnauzer. and adjust the default size of the VS window based on the thumbnail size.

I did this as I find the default 80x60 size a tad on the small size. The resulting XV can still read the smaler older thumbnails, but older XV's will just ignore and rebuild the larger thumbnails if it encounders them.

This will probably never make it into the standard XV jumbo patch, unless it is setup as a compile time option.

For details see my xv modifications page...
http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~anthony/info/graphics/xv_mods.hints

Anthony

XV jumbo patches

Posted Feb 10, 2023 0:24 UTC (Fri) by anthony (guest, #23137) [Link]

The previous link to my notes on adjusting VS has changed and is now...
https://antofthy.gitlab.io/info/graphics/xv_mods.txt