LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers"

XV jumbo patches

anthony — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 00:24:30 +0000

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

xv as a slideshow screensaver

jackn — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 10:39:19 +0000

I'd love to get hold of your way of setting up a screensaver slideshow with XV.

I've tried chbg as an xscreensaver client, but chbg wouldn't install. Some say it's buggy. I can't find help.

I've looked at XV. It works in your hands, which is great. It is shareware, charging $25, isn't it?!

Thanks a bunch,
Jackn

XV jumbo patches

anthony — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 00:59:27 +0000

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 as a slideshow screensaver

dillthedog — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 15:21:34 +0000

This is what I did until recently. However after upgrading KDE it seems to be a bit broken. I have looked for similar under gnome but although there are a few screensavers that can work on an image directory they all do fancy things to the image rather than just transition from one image to another in a slideshow.

xv as a slideshow screensaver

dillthedog — Thu, 03 Jun 2004 15:19:39 +0000

I'd be quite interested to know how you do this. I used to use the KDE screensaver as described by the other poster but it seems to be quite broken after I upgraded KDE recently to 3.2.

XV jumbo patches

roelofs — Sun, 23 May 2004 21:17:49 +0000

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

Info - printing, etc.

QuisUtDeus — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 20:34:42 +0000

A question I haven't found an answer for is: How do I take an info page and make it printable? "man -t command" is easy. Is there something for info pages? Thanks.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

ahilliard — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 17:37:31 +0000

(reads the article) Oops. Nevermind!

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

ahilliard — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 17:34:06 +0000

Grumpy editor! Since you've tried the rest, now try the best: GwenView. It uses the QT toolkit, so if you're a GTK guy it might be not for you, but if you're willing to try it, check out:

http://gwenview.sourceforge.net

I only found it because someone was kind enough to package it for Debian SID. There are also Mandrake, SuSE, and RedHat packages on their site. It seems the authors have realized that distribution is the solution to stagnootin development.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

cbbrowne — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 21:42:17 +0000

Another option that is fairly similar to "gthumb" is xzgv It is an X-based 'successor' to zgv, which was the "classic" image viewer for the Linux console.

"Most file formats are supported, and the thumbnails used are compatible with xv, zgv, and the Gimp."

With its lurid name, I somewhat hesitate to mention pornview. It is as good for displaying "less lurid" material, though you might want to rename the binary if showing it off at work or to your mother...

Info

mikachu — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 18:59:59 +0000

this works in galeon (and probably epiphany) too

[OT] circles in GIMP

madrabbit — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 15:58:36 +0000

Actually, that's calculating 2*2, but I bet you knew that already :-).

Nice timing

joib — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 14:15:26 +0000

Nice timing of the article; The recent introduction of xfree86 4.3 in debian sarge caused my old xv package, which had been around since the potato days, to be removed. It was kind of sad to see it go after all those years of service... :(

IIRC the reason was some conflict with xlib6g, another old package which was also removed, and xv depended on it.

Anyways, I decided that instead of finding some third-party xv .deb, I should take the effort to start using some free viewer(s) instead. As another poster noted, I think it's a mistake to complain that the other viewers don't have exactly the same features as xv. Having used xv for about 8 years now, it's natural that learning to use some other tool feels awkward, but that's just a fact of life. Things change. For more complicated editing there's always gimp, so personally I'm mainly interested in a small application that loads quickly and is as simple to use as possible.

So far qiv, feh, xzgv and gthumb are highest on my list. display, from ImageMagick, seems to have all the required features but it seems very slow for some reason.

Grumpy Reader(tm)'s guide to Open Viewings

Saigua — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 07:55:50 +0000

Of course the most important thing is to use mousebuttons (wheels, whatever) 4-9 in order to rewind in an enthused voiceover (via text-to-speech) by the artist who made the image, perhaps subtitled in the viewer's native tongue.

Next to being more like XnView and IrfanView32. <--XnView works where bsd does. Irfan's only goes to MacOS X and some other stops.
XnView rocks hard. Tons of editing stuff...maybe even image comparison, I haven't dug into the really picky bits.
The thing is, I also love JPEG 2000. It's one of those things that's copyrighted by ISO and L1 is free, but the extra bits for watermarking and laying it precisely over a geographical understanding and cross-linking other maps is like, extra. Plus the codecs....well, the OSS ones can bake a bit more.

Then there's SVG. Maybe I haven't run into the right enthusiasts, but outside of Sodipodi it's kind of stilted (and the W3C's phone-capable (diluted!) svg contest hasn't shown in my handset yet. (And it ended Jan 30 or so.))

Still more International and Emu keymap fights between F (or another filemanager) and the image viewer, and vim, and we'll finally have an outline for what we -really- want, right?

16 bit PPMs

giraffedata — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 18:19:41 +0000

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.

Image croping in gthumb

X-Nc — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 15:58:21 +0000

Ah, I've got 2.2.1 from freshrpms. It'll likely be coming down the pike any day. The one thing I have _really_ needed was a tool to do quick croping.

As for googling... I gave it a shot earlier but guess I didn't have good enough search terms. I'll try again.

Thanks JC,
Joe

Image croping in gthumb

corbet — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 15:07:58 +0000

The "crop" operation is on the "Image" menu in gthumb 2.3.0.

As for xv, a quick bit of googling turned up a version which I installed on RH9 with no trouble. I forget where it came from...seek and ye shall find.

Image croping in gthumb

X-Nc — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 15:05:13 +0000

The article mentions that gthumb has a crop feature but doesn't say how to get to it. I clicked on everything I could find in gthumb but could not get anything dealing with crop.

I went and grabed the source for xv but it barfs all over the place when trying to compile it. The only rpm they have is for RH 5.2 so it's unlikely I'll be able to run xv anymore. :-(

Anybody use xvscan?

brouhaha — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 06:02:37 +0000

Tummy.com used to sell a version of XV enhanced to work with HP Scanjet scanners (and eventually a few others). It came with source code, and the cost of xvscan included the xv license. Although I'm probably not as grumpy about image viewing and editing as our esteemed grumpy editor, I still haven't found a good alternative to xvscan.

Unfortunately at some point I went for a long time without scanning, and in the mean time managed to lose my xvscan sources. Tummy.com no longer sells xvscan, and my emailed plea for a replacement copy of the sources apparently fell on deaf ears. Sigh.

XV rocks

jzbiciak — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 05:32:09 +0000

Yup. My bad. Thanks.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

komarek — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 02:17:27 +0000

I love the grumpy editor series, because I have all the same complaints. I think it is telling that the accomplished editor of LWN, who is author and kernel hacker and consultant, can't find his way through the current "usability enhancements" of the Gnome project to get work done. That he can't find a replacement for a program we've all been using since 1995 (I remember the pre-3.10a days of xv, as far as that goes).

He's grumpy because he has a set of tools that work, but are getting old and are unmaintained. And nobody is replacing them. There's no need to reinvent the Crescent wrench, though a number of infomercials try. But for some unknown reason people feel a need to reinvent the concept of calander software. Just think how nice it would be if image viewers (not editors, just viewers) evolved their interfaces in a consistent, harmonious way. So that you wouldn't have to guess backspace for one, left arrow for another, and p for another.

Imagine that image viewers worked like emacs editing keystrokes: I can use ctrl-a in most programs to go to the beginning of the line. Well, that used to be true, right up until all the KDE and Gnome folks got stupid on us and decided that ctrl-c, which even DOS knows should send a break signal, now means cut (or copy, whatever). I've got news for the KDE and Gnome devs trying to mimic windows -- the majority of their audience are using unix-like systems. And when using unix, I expect things to be unix-y. If they want to continue attracting smart unix people to their projects, they'll have to quit doing things that piss-off unix people.

Obviously, I am grumpy. And that's probably why I feel such affinity for the grumpy editor series.

-Paul Komarek

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

torin — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 00:47:06 +0000

I use feh and it works quite well. It handles orientation changes for you with < and > as well as uses space, backspace and other keys to move around the list file. I use 'feh -r -q -p -A "gimp -s -d %f" when I pull the images off of my camera. If I want to crop or otherwise edit an image, I just hit return and it comes up in the gimp.

Ever tried pixie plus

miannac — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 21:26:30 +0000

Just my .2 $ contribution for the editor: have you ever tried pixie plus?
I think it can do the most of the thing you need and much more!

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

NAR — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 21:12:48 +0000

Great article (and some of the comments are pretty useful as well). However, I feel that a table like the one below would be useful at the end of a "Grumpy Editor's" article to summarize things and help the readers to choose an application:

+--------------+----------+----------+
|              | feature1 | feature2 |
+--------------+----------+----------+
| application1 |    X     |     -    |
+--------------+----------+----------+
| application2 |    X     |     X    |
+--------------+----------+----------+

Bye,NAR

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

jmason — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 18:36:48 +0000

"kuickshow ." will do what you want. But I agree -- it's a serious UI problem, as that's not obvious.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

walterh — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 18:16:29 +0000

I really like kuickshow, but there is one thing that
stops me from using it. If I call xv *.jpg in a directory
with many images, xv will open one window and let me
page through the images.
If I do the same with kuickshow, it will open a new window
for each file, effectively killing my system if the
directory is large.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

Quazatron — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 14:09:16 +0000

Thanks for the tip! It's incredible the amount of powerfull apps one can have around the hard disk and never know about...

BTW: I usually use ImageMagick to shrink digital photos in order to mail them. A simple mogrify -resize 1024x768 *.jpg does the trick...

ImageMagick GUI

tzafrir — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 11:08:26 +0000

display has the advantage of accepting an image from standard input.

It also allows you the full set of ImageMagick manipulations by pressing the mouse button on the image.

slide show?
display file1 file2 file3

And a number of other small features, such as:
display http://lwn.net/images/lcorner.png

A well-behaving unix image-viewer.

xv as a slideshow screensaver

wjhenney — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 09:51:43 +0000

If you use KDE then you can set this up very easily with Kslideshow. Choose "Appearance & Themes"->"Screen Saver" in the Control Center, then "Banners & Pictures"->"Slideshow". The "Setup" dialog then lets you select a directory that it will search for images (with the option of searching subdirs too). The delay between images is also configurable.

Presumably GNOME has something similar.

The display program is not usable

mow — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 07:57:39 +0000

You don't even have to compile yourself.
Just look at the unofficial APT repositories at
http://www.apt-get.org/ and search for xv

XV rocks

Ross — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 07:24:06 +0000

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

roelofs — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 06:18:25 +0000

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 as a slideshow screensaver

scripter — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 05:08:18 +0000

Since I have a digital camera, I like my screen saver randomly cycle through the photos I have, displaying them ever 6 seconds. Currently, I use a modified .xscreensaver, a shell script and xv to display the images. Is there an easier way? It seems like there should be. Something as easy to configure as the screensaver slideshow that comes with Windows XP.

Reply to this post if you want my xscreensaver + zsh + xv slideshow.

XV rocks

rfunk — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 04:11:38 +0000

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

Info

rfunk — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 04:08:45 +0000

If you use Konqueror you can get to info pages with a URL like info:/gzip.

Thanks: me too

iabervon — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 03:46:22 +0000

My feeling is that "info" is a fine format, and the viewer in emacs is a
fine viewer (the standalone program manages to be terrible, despite being
barely different from the emacs one). The main problem is that there
isn't a standard organization of the information in the file, and all of
the examples I've seen are very hard to use for reference. (For example,
by looking at the info node for "ls", try to figure out what -F does,
what the default colors are, and how to get other colors; I had to go to
a pre-info man page to find out some of this, since the current man pages
have removed all of the information that isn't in the info nodes).

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

jmason — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 01:36:58 +0000

Yep, kuickshow's my favourite -- Page Up/Page Down to jump through a selection of images, too. However, it doesn't have all the bells and
whistles I enjoyed in the "xv" days.

Agreed BTW about the ee UI. it's a nightmare. You left out the bug whereby you could wind up with some kind of toolbar attached to the image -- sorry, can't remember exactly *how* at this stage -- however, if the image was too small, it would be *scaled* in the X dimension (yes -- the *image* would be scaled) to the width of the toolbar! truly bizarre.

XV rocks

jzbiciak — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 01:36:32 +0000

Hey Greg,

The XV patches should show up here:

Enjoy,

--Joe

XV rocks

Ross — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 21:55:26 +0000

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.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Viewers

evgeny — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 21:32:17 +0000

> I would like to see an article on window managers. I've never found one
> that I really like.

The article or the wm? ;-)

Then you should seriously re-consider fvwm. I've yet to find a feature that doesn't exist there. Sorry about OT.