Like "ls", but for images. Shows thumbnails in terminal using sixel graphics.
lsix [ FILES ... ]
Just typing lsix
will show images in the current working directory.
You can also specify filenames and, of course, use shell wild cards
(e.g., lsix *jpg *png
).
Because lsix uses ImageMagick pretty much any image format will be
supported. However, some may be slow to render (like PDF), so lsix
doesn't show them unless you ask specifically. If you want to force a
listing of a certain type of image simply specify the filenames or
use a wildcard (*.pdf
in the example below),.
If you specify a GIF (or actually any file that has multiple images in
it) on the command line, all the frames will get expanded and shown in
a montage. For example, lsix nyancat.gif
shows all the frames. Note
that GIF stores some frames as only the pixels that differ from the
previous frame.
You may have noticed that PNGs and SVG files have correct alpha channel for the terminal background. That is because lsix uses terminal escape sequences to try to figure out your foreground and background colors. (Foreground is used for the text fill color.)
In the first example below, after running lsix
in a white on black
xterm, I sent an escape sequence to swap foreground and background
colors. When I ran it again, lsix
detected it and changed the
background color to white. Of course, you can pick whatever default
colors you want (e.g., xterm -bg blue
, in the second example below).
-
Detects if your terminal can display SIXEL graphics inline using control sequences.
-
Works great over ssh. Perfect for manipulating those images on the web server when you can't quite remember what each one was.
-
Non-bitmap graphics often work fine (.svg, .eps, .pdf, .xcf).
-
Automatically detects if your terminal, like xterm, can increase the number of color registers to improve the image quality and does so.
-
Automatically detects terminal's foreground and background colors.
-
In terminals that support dtterm WindowOps, the number of tiles per row will adjust appropriately to the window width.
-
If there are many images in a directory (>21), lsix will display them one row at a time so you don't need to wait for the entire montage to be created.
-
If your filenames are too long, lsix will wrap the text before passing it into ImageMagick's
montage
. (Without lsix,montage
just jumbles long filenames on top of one another.) -
You can easily change things like the width of each tile in the montage, the font family, and point size by editing simple variables at the top of the file. (Tip: try
convert -list font
to see what fonts you have on your machine.) -
Unicode filenames work fine, as long as your font has the glyphs.
Just put the lsix
file in your path (e.g., /usr/local/bin) and run
it. It's just a BASH shell script.
The only prerequisite software is ImageMagick. If you don't have it
yet, your OS's package manager will make it easy to get. (E.g.,
apt-get install imagemagick
).
MacOS users may prefer to install lsix using brew install lsix
which
installs ImageMagick, if necessary.
I developed this using xterm in vt340 emulation mode, but I believe this should work on any Sixel compatible terminal. You may test your terminal by viewing a single image, like so:
convert foo.jpg -geometry 800x480 sixel:-
Note that xterm does not have Sixel mode enabled by default, so you need to either run it like so:
xterm -ti vt340
Or, make vt340 the default terminal type for xterm. Add the following
to your .Xresources
file and run xrdb -merge .Xresources
.
! Allow sixel graphics. (Try: "convert -colors 16 foo.jpg sixel:-").
xterm*decTerminalID : vt340
Further, some distributions, such as Fedora, appear to not compile xterm
with sixel support. In that case, try an alternate terminal, such as
foot
or mlterm
.
- XTerm (tested)
- foot (tested)
- MLterm (tested)
- iTerm2 for Apple MacOS (tested)
- WSLtty for Microsoft Windows (reported)
- MinTTY for Cygwin (Microsoft Windows) (reported)
- Yaft for Linux framebuffer (tested)
- VTE (special compilation, reported)
- MacOS Terminal, alacritty, kitty
- All standard libvte based terminals
- gnome-terminal
- terminator
- lxterm
Because lsix
is currently designed to be very simple, there are no
command line flags, no configuration files, no knobs to twiddle, or
frobs to frobnosticate. However, since the script is so simple, if you
want to make a change, it's pretty easy to do just by editing the
file. Everything is nicely commented with the most common default
variables at the top.
I welcome feedback. If you use lsix and like it or have suggestions for how it can be improved, please go ahead and send your thoughts to me @hackerb9 via GitHub.
-
XTerm's reverse video mode (
xterm -rv
) is different from specifying the foreground and background explicitly. There is a way to detect the latter, but not the former. That means the background color will be incorrect for folks who use XTerm's reverseVideo resource. (See issue #20). -
XTerm's screen width is currently limited to 1000px due to a misfeature which causes it to silently show nothing. This limitation will be removed once xterm can handle images greater than 1000x1000. [Last tested with XTerm(344)].
-
Filenames that begin with "@" are special to ImageMagick and it'll freak out if you don't prepend a directory. (
lsix ./@foo.png
) (This is a bug in ImageMagick, not lsix). -
Specifying the empty string
""
as a filename makes ImageMagick hang. (This appears to be an ImageMagick bug / misfeature). -
Long filenames are wrapped, but not intelligently. Would it complicate this script too much to make it prefer to wrap on whites space, dashes, underscores, and periods? Maybe.
-
Directories specified on the command line are processed as if the user had cd'd to that directory. It wouldn't be hard to implement recursion, but is there actually a need? I'm reluctant to complicate such a simple script with command line flags.
-
If you run
lsix foo.avi
, you're asking for trouble.
-
The Sixel standard doesn't appear to have a way to query the size of the graphics screen. Reading the VT340 documentation, it appears your program has to already know the resolution of the device you're rendering on.
XTerm, as of version 344, has added a control sequence that solves the problem โ
CSI ? Pi ; Pa ; Pv S
โ but some terminals, for examplemlterm
, haven't yet implemented it.There is an alternate way to read the window size using the dtterm WindowOps extension but it is not quite the right solution as the geometry of the Sixel graphics screen is not necessarily the same as the window size. (For example, xterm limits the graphics geometry to 1000x1000, even though the window can actually be larger.) To help with terminals such as mlterm,
lsix
will use the dtterm WindowOps as a fallback.If neither solution works,
lsix
will assume you are on a VT340 (800x480) and can fit only 6 tiles per row. -
The Sixel standard also lacks a way to query the number of color registers available. I used the extensions from
xterm
to do so, but I do not know how widely implemented they are. If a terminal does not respond,lsix
presumes you're on an original vt340 and uses only 16 color registers. (Sorry, 4-gray vt330 users! Time to upgrade. ;-) ) -
The Kermit project created a MS-DOS terminal emulator that was popular in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Its sixel implementation is not compatible with lsix because it shows the graphics on a screen separate from the text. However, I noticed one feature in its documentation: an escape sequence to request the current graphics window size and number of colors:
ESC [ ? 256 n Request screen size report
Report is ESC [ ? 256; Ph; Pw; Pc n for graphics systems
where Ph is screen height in dots
Pw is screen width in dots
Pc is number of colors (0, 1 or 16, for none, b/w, ega/vga)
Report is ESC [ ? 24; 80; 0 n for pure text mono systems.
Did any other terminal emulators ever use the sequence? Would it be
worthwhile to add to lsix
?
-
libsixel is an excellent project for writing programs that can output optimized Sixel graphics commands. Because I have a lot of respect for the project, I feel I should explain why
lsix
does not use libsixel.-
(a) I wanted lsix to work everywhere easily. Bash and imagemagick are ubiquitous, so a shell script is a natural solution.
-
(b) I wanted
lsix
to be simple enough that it could be easily customized and extended by other people. (Including myself.) -
(c) ImageMagick has better support for reading different formats than stb_image (the library used by libsixel's
img2sixel
). (For example: xpm, svg, 16-bit png, and even sixel files are not recognized by img2sixel). Since ImageMagick can read all of those and write sixel output directly, it made sense to use it for both. -
(d) While libsixel is optimized and would surely be faster than ImageMagick, it's overkill. For a simple directory listing, this is plenty fast enough.
-
-
-
Chapter 14. Sixel Graphics.
-
Chapter 16 Difference between Level 1 and Level 2 Sixel implementations.
Nota bene: this reference has the sense for DECSDM (sixel display mode) reversed! The actual behaviour of the VT340 is that when DECSDM is reset (the default), sixel scrolling is enabled. This can be done by sending
Esc[?80l
, but lsix does not do so as it would break many current terminal emulators. See issue #41 for details.
-
-
DEC STD 070 Video Systems Reference Manual. A weighty tome which covers nearly everything in exacting detail. I referred mostly to sections 4 (escape sequences) and 9 (sixel programming).
-
VT340 Test, a project to document the actual behaviour of the DEC VT340 hardware.
-
Digital ANSI-Compliant Printing Protocol: Level 2 Programming Reference Manual, Chapter 5: Sixel Graphics. An excellent and reasonably clear discussion for anyone who wants to generate or parse sixel graphics.