nqiv (neo quick image viewer) is inspired by the lineage of qiv and intended to implement modern features such as multithreading and GPU rendering, as well as to reduce dependencies to a handful of mature and well-supported choices.
See the releases for builds. GNU Linux builds are provided as AppImages, while Windows 10+ builds are provided as .zip archives containing an executable and needed directory. To build nqiv manually, see DEVELOPMENT.md
Run nqiv with -h for basic help. nqiv strives to be portable and to not change anything on a system without being explicitly told to. Upon running nqiv, it will look for a config file in a default location, and will offer a command (to stderr) to create it if it isn't available. Given the graphical emphasis of Windows, scripts/nqiv_deploy_cfg.bat is also provided to do this same task with a click.
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libvips supports fast and memory-efficient encoding and decoding of a wide range of images.
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Massive images are supported by means of partial loading for best fidelity, or by resizing the entire image to the maximum texture size (typically 16K by 16K) for best performance.
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nqiv builds on a variety of platforms, including GNU Linux, Linux with libmusl, FreeBSD, and MSYS2 on Windows. A cross-compiled Windows build is also available and 32-bit builds have been tested.
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There is mouse and keyboard support through a configurable bind system.
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The FreeDesktop Thumbnail Managing standard is can be used to manipulate thumbnails that are shared with other software.
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nqiv is designed to work with other Unix-like apps, both by accepting commands through stdin, and printing a list of selected images through stdout.
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Configurable dynamic unloading of images allows managing of nqiv's memory footprint while browsing a massive number of images.
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A novel and flexible format is used to issue commands to and to configure the program. See
default.cfgfor the standard example with documentation through comments. This file was generated by nqiv with no further editing. The logo featured in this document is also a screenshot of nqiv's thumbnail view with a tailored config file.