Several hundred MB RAM usage for a single Terminal window are just not acceptable.
Somehow many devs today write their software under the assumption that a user with 2GB RAM or 4GB RAM will at all times only run one single piece of software.
Like I know ranger has an option for it, but iirc there's also a way to just run a command ala `cat`ing a text file. If you'd like, I can look into it more if you can't already find out how to do it by searching.
Also, people are mentioning feh, I'd like to plug in sxiv (not my program though).
However, I'm sad to say that when I tried this again rn, it didn't work anymore. (I know for a fact it used to work great because I used to use it.)
The funny thing is, ranger's image preview still works for me (same terminal and everything), so I guess one could start going through the ranger source code to see how they wrap w3mimagedisplay if they really wanted to.
I don't really have the motivation for that though because, although I'm a heavy terminal user (and it would be nice), recently switching to emacs means a lot of my file management can be done with dired (an emacs package). And dired can do image previews quite nicely already [3] (I'm assuming provided you're using GUI emacs^). ^^
^Emacs can fire up terminals inside it anyway, so using GUI emacs is not a problem for me, even though I'm heavily terminal orientated.
^^Although I think I prefer sxiv's thumbnail mode for browsing directories full of images (as opposed to a few here and there).
[1]: http://blog.z3bra.org/2014/01/images-in-terminal.html
And yes, iTerm2 also displays animated gifs.
What are the advantages of that over using a dedicated image viewer program?
Even giving the ability to set a specific pixel to a specific rgb value would get far. Yes, some programs would get it wrong or would be annoying to use. But think what it would enable. Even at 3 fps, you could still show the user a performance graph of your program, or a flame chart. In the terminal. No extra windows required, no fiddling with GUI frameworks, just "set some pixels to some values."
In the short term, being able to set text to a specific foreground and background rgb would be nice. I'm talking 24-bit color. It turns out that this is not possible across all Unix variants: OS X default Terminal doesn't support 24-bit color for text. And there's no reason why it should be like that. The standards are in place, and they are a straightfoward extension to exiting behavior. The toolmakers just haven't enabled the other makers to use it. Of course, it's because it makes no sense for Apple to waste engineering cycles on that. But that doesn't change that it would be true that if they gave us better tools, we would do more.
The issue is that it has to be a minimum spec that's supported by all platforms. (All Unix platforms would be fine.) Simply writing a program that supports a nonstandard way of setting pixels to values wouldn't cut it. At least at first. That's probably how it has to start, though, in order for others to follow.
Combine it with dwm :)
"Yep that looks like it's right"
git add tmp.png
In short: the time savings introduced by shortening the feedback loop tend to add up. There is a reason why Web developers now use auto-reloading solutions, despite the fact that it saves "just one keystroke" (F5 in this case).
http://superuser.com/questions/246825/open-file-from-the-com...
(I suppose a similar thing could be done on *nix with a suitably modified execlp()/execvp().)
On Linux you should be able to wire up binfmt_misc, the plugin system for execve, to xdg-open.
Then you could just call that external difftool when comparing images:
git difftool --tool img-diff
I guess at least since it's based on Electron, it might have more longevity than something built from a cobbled together base. Here's hoping!