nsxiv is a fork of the now-unmaintained sxiv with the purpose of being a (mostly) drop-in replacement for sxiv, maintaining its interface and adding simple, sensible features. nsxiv is free software licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later and aims to be easy to modify and customize.
Please file a bug report if something does not work as documented or expected on Codeberg after making sure you are using the latest release. Contributions are welcome, see CONTRIBUTING to get started.
config.hkey-handlerimage-info & thumb-infowin-titleImage mode with default colors:
Thumbnail mode with custom colors:
nsxiv is available on the following distributions/repositories. If you don't see your distro listed here, either contact your distro's package maintainer or consider packaging it yourself and adding it to the respective community repo.
nsxiv requires the following software to be installed:
The following dependencies are optional:
inotify*: Used for auto-reloading images on change.
Disabled via HAVE_INOTIFY=0.libXft, freetype2, fontconfig: Used for the status bar.
Disabled via HAVE_LIBFONTS=0.libexif: Used for auto-orientation and exif thumbnails.
Disable via HAVE_LIBEXIF=0.Please make sure to install the corresponding development packages in case that you want to build nsxiv on a distribution with separate runtime and development packages (e.g. *-dev on Debian).
* inotify is a Linux-specific API for monitoring filesystem changes.
It's not natively available on *BSD systems but can be enabled via
installing and linking against libinotify-kqueue.
nsxiv is built using the commands:
$ make
You can pass HAVE_X=0 to make to disable an optional dependency.
For example:
$ make HAVE_LIBEXIF=0
will disable libexif support. Alternatively they can be disabled via editing
config.mk. OPT_DEP_DEFAULT=0 can be used to disable all optional
dependencies.
Installing nsxiv:
# make install
Installing desktop entry:
# make install-desktop
Installing icons:
# make install-icon
Installing all of the above:
# make install-all
Please note, that these requires root privileges.
By default, nsxiv is installed using the prefix /usr/local, so the full path
of the executable will be /usr/local/bin/nsxiv, the .desktop entry will be
/usr/local/share/applications/nsxiv.desktop and the icon path will be
/usr/local/share/icons/hicolor/{size}/apps/nsxiv.png.
You can install nsxiv into a directory of your choice by changing this command to:
$ make PREFIX="/your/dir" install
Example scripts are installed using EGPREFIX which defaults to
/usr/local/share/doc/nsxiv/examples. You can change EGPREFIX the same way
you can change PREFIX shown above.
The build-time specific settings of nsxiv can be found in the file config.h. Please check and change them, so that they fit your needs. If the file config.h does not already exist, then you have to create it with the following command:
$ make config.h
Refer to the man-page for the documentation:
$ man nsxiv
You may also view the man-page online. However, note that the online man-page might not accurately represent your local copy.
Can I open remote urls with nsxiv?
Yes, see nsxiv-url
Can I open all the images in a directory?
Yes, see nsxiv-rifle
Can I set default arguments for nsxiv?
Yes, see nsxiv-env
Can I pipe images into nsxiv?
Yes, see nsxiv-pipe
You may also wish to see the known issues.
The main method of customizing nsxiv is by setting values for the variables in config.h, or by using Xresources as explained in the manual. If these options are not sufficient, you may implement your own features by following this guide.
Due to our limited project scope, certain features or customization cannot be merged into nsxiv mainline. Following the spirit of suckless software, we host the nsxiv-extra repo where users are free to submit whatever patches or scripts they wish.
If you think your custom features can be beneficial for the general user base and is within our project scope, please submit it as a pull request on this repository, then we may merge it to mainline.
Description on how to use or submit patches can be found on nsxiv-extra's README.
You can browse the source code repository on Codeberg or get a copy using git with the following command:
$ git clone https://codeberg.org/nsxiv/nsxiv.git
You can view the changelog here
If nsxiv isn't able to fit your needs, check out the image viewer section of suckless rocks to find other minimal image viewers to try out.
Below are a couple other lesser known projects not listed in suckless rocks.