What is viu?

viu is a small but powerful command-line image viewer written in Rust that displays images directly in your terminal. It adapts to your terminal's capabilities, using the best available protocol — from the high-fidelity Kitty and iTerm2 graphics protocols down to Unicode block characters as a universal fallback.

            🚀 Why Latest Versions Matter: viu continuously improves support for new image formats, terminal protocols, and display options. The latest releases include AVIF support, improved Kitty protocol rendering, better GIF animation handling, and performance optimizations for large images.
        

⚡ Key Features of viu

🖼️ Multiple Display Protocols

Supports Kitty terminal graphics protocol, iTerm2 inline images, Sixel graphics, and Unicode block characters — automatically picks the best one for your terminal.

📦 Wide Format Support

Displays PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, ICO, TIFF, WebP, AVIF, and many more formats via Rust's image crate.

🎞️ GIF Animation

Plays animated GIFs directly in the terminal, looping through frames at the correct frame rate.

📏 Flexible Sizing

Control width, height, or let viu auto-fit the image to your terminal window. Useful for pipelines and scripting.

🔗 Pipe-Friendly

Reads from stdin or file arguments, making it composable with tools like curl, find, and shell pipelines.

⚡ Fast & Lightweight

Written in Rust — minimal startup time, low memory footprint, and no runtime dependencies beyond the binary.

🖥️ Supported Terminal Protocols

Kitty: Full-resolution pixel-perfect images (kitty, Ghostty, WezTerm)
iTerm2: Inline image protocol (iTerm2, WezTerm, Tabby, VSCode)
Sixel: Compatible with foot, Windows Terminal, and many classic terminals
Unicode blocks: Universal fallback — works in every terminal

📦 Installation from debian.griffo.io

Step 1: Add Repository

curl -sS https://debian.griffo.io/EA0F721D231FDD3A0A17B9AC7808B4DD62C41256.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor --yes -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/debian.griffo.io.gpg
echo "deb https://debian.griffo.io/apt $(lsb_release -sc 2>/dev/null) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.griffo.io.list
sudo apt update
                

curl -sS https://debian.griffo.io/EA0F721D231FDD3A0A17B9AC7808B4DD62C41256.asc | gpg --dearmor --yes -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/debian.griffo.io.gpg
echo "deb https://debian.griffo.io/apt $(lsb_release -sc 2>/dev/null) main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.griffo.io.list
apt update
                

Step 2: Install viu

# Install latest viu
sudo apt install viu

# Verify installation
viu --version
                

# Install latest viu
apt install viu

# Verify installation
viu --version
                

🎯 Usage Examples

Basic usage:

# Display a single image
viu image.png

# Display multiple images
viu *.jpg

# Display from stdin (e.g. downloaded image)
curl -sL https://example.com/photo.jpg | viu -

# Display a GIF animation
viu animation.gif
        

Sizing options:

# Set width in terminal columns
viu -w 80 image.png

# Set height in terminal rows
viu -h 24 image.png

# Disable auto-resizing (use original size)
viu -s image.png
        

Pipeline examples:

# Browse images in a directory
for f in ~/Pictures/*.jpg; do viu -w 40 "$f"; done

# Preview image from a URL
curl -sL https://example.com/image.png | viu -

# Use with fzf to browse and preview
find . -name "*.png" | fzf --preview "viu -w 60 {}"
        

🚀 Why Choose debian.griffo.io?

📊 Repository Comparison:

Official Debian: viu is not packaged in official Debian repositories
Cargo Install: Requires Rust toolchain and compilation time
debian.griffo.io: Latest version (1.6.1+) available immediately via apt

✅ Latest Features: Get newest viu features including AVIF and improved protocol support
✅ No Rust Compilation: Pre-built musl static binary, no toolchain or extra dependencies needed
✅ Automatic Updates: Packages updated within hours of upstream releases
✅ Proper Packaging: Correctly packaged as a Debian package with clean install/remove
✅ Multi-Distribution: Works on Bookworm, Trixie, Forky, and Sid

📦 Package Build Repository

The Debian packages are automatically built and maintained in this GitHub repository:

🖼️ viu-debian - Latest release builds

🔗 Related Packages

Also available from debian.griffo.io:

Yazi File Manager - Terminal file manager with built-in image preview
eza - Modern ls replacement
fzf Fuzzy Finder - Combine with viu for interactive image browsing

            🎯 Perfect for: Developers previewing assets from the terminal, sysadmins checking images over SSH, users of Kitty, Ghostty, or WezTerm who want pixel-perfect image display, and anyone integrating image previews into shell scripts or tools like yazi and fzf.
        

💝 Support This Project

If this repository saves you time and effort, please consider supporting it!

⭐ Star on GitHub 🐦 Share on Twitter

🖼️ Install Latest viu on Debian