Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

chickenPie4tea · 2016-01-15 12:16:53

Good work, now my default image viewer.
would be nice if there was a setting I could add to .vimivrc.py to start the library in a default dir eg ~/Pictures
at the moment it always starts in my home dir

library_default_path= ???

Some sort of searching and tagging would be a great addidtion

Last edited by chickenPie4tea (2016-01-15 12:49:28)

karlch · 2016-01-15 13:17:55

Glad to hear

Well, it starts from wherever you start it in the terminal. I don't think I should give it a default path. I suspect you start it using the vimiv.desktop file. If so you could simply edit the exec line to e.g.:

Exec=vimiv ~/Pictures

I am not sure how/if I could include a setting in my vimivrc.py that sets a default directory only for desktop launches.

Could you elaborate a bit more on that? It is currently possible to search through the current filelist and to mark images. What would you like to add/how is your idea different?

EDIT: I really shouldn't reply before trying something... I added the setting desktop_start_dir which is only invoked if one starts vimiv via vimiv --start-from-desktop. The desktop file does this per default now.

Last edited by karlch (2016-01-15 13:50:37)

respiranto · 2016-01-15 13:51:59

Thank you!

Though I have a small problem:
When calling `vimiv -B [<directory>]', the statusbar appears with the Message: "No valid path, opening library viewer".
Subsequently typing ':' to enter command mode makes the command field disappear as soon as the above message would.

Another point: Would it be possible to allow several keys for one action in the configuration file (probably via a possibly optional array)?

karlch · 2016-01-15 14:05:14

Good catch! Fixed it
Sorry for abusing you guys as testers, I am the only one that tries new features before pushing them to master and obviously only find bugs I think of...

Learning from above, I will look into that. If it doesn't make my handle_key_press to complicated it will be added.

respiranto · 2016-01-15 14:15:35

You certainly don't have to apologize for doing hard work to offer free and open source software, just because it is not perfect.
I am always happy to be at least a little of help.

Unfortunately, I currently have too little time (and ambition) to properly learn python so I could fix the bugs respectively add the desired features myself.
Therefore I am really thankful for your and anybody elses work in the free software world.

chickenPie4tea · 2016-01-15 14:52:40

Thanks for the reply,
I read the man page but didn't know it I could just use
Exec=vimiv ~/Pictures, so that's easy to set up a keybinding for.

In the man page it says -r for recursive searching but I just found out by experimenting that you use / to search
but what I was after was marking or tagging images then being able to search through just the marks, I didn't see anything on that in the man page. From what I have tried marks don't survive a restart of vimiv.

Last edited by chickenPie4tea (2016-01-15 15:05:00)

karlch · 2016-01-15 16:09:13

Looks like keybindings as lists actually simplified the code, great idea!

chickenPie4tea wrote:

In the man page it says -r for recursive searching but I just found out by experimenting that you use / to search

Well, -r is a command line option. So e.g. vimiv -r ~/Images will search the directory ~/Images recursively for images and populate a filelist with all of them. In contrast "/" is a keybinding, listed a bit below which searches the current filelist. (Do update for true recursiveness which I just implemented)

chickenPie4tea wrote:

but what I was after was marking or tagging images then being able to search through just the marks, I didn't see anything on that in the man page. From what I have tried marks don't survive a restart of vimiv

You are right, they don't. So basically marks, just persistend. Possibly saved in a file ~/.vimiv/tags. And the option to search through them?

chickenPie4tea · 2016-01-15 17:48:20

"You are right, they don't. So basically marks, just persistend. Possibly saved in a file ~/.vimiv/tags. And the option to search through them?"
Yes if they were saved somewhere then I could make a simple script to search through them or use inbuilt search if it exists.

Last edited by chickenPie4tea (2016-01-15 17:49:37)

karlch · 2016-01-16 14:10:12

I thought about this for a while and implemented the following:
Marked images can be saved to a tagfile "~/.vimiv/Tags/tagname" with the command "tag_write tagname". They can be loaded into the filelist with "tag_load tagname" and removed via "tag_remove tagname".
Once they are loaded the simple built-in search via "/" can be used (and anything else one can do in image mode).

To make all this a bit more fun I also implemented the possibility to "pipe to vimiv".
This means one can run an external command like "!find ~/Images -ctime -5 -type f |" which will open all files in ~/Images younger than 5 days.
Obviously this also makes it possible to use the external grep command for tagfiles, e.g. "!grep "last_holiday" ~/.vimiv/Tags/tagname |" and therefore do a lot more fancy stuff.

Hope this helps

As always, happy to hear any feedback and bugs and refer to the man-page for further info.

chickenPie4tea · 2016-01-16 14:20:17

That's brilliant, especially the pipe stuff - will be easy to load recent images from my camera now.

respiranto · 2016-02-01 01:01:20

I just tried to open an image from within a graphical filemanager, i.e. by using vimiv.desktop, which resulted in vimiv showing me my home directory.

Is there a reason to use 'Exec=vimiv --start-from-desktop' instead of simply 'Exec=vimiv %f' in the .desktop file?

Edit:
I just found out that this appears to be a new feature, so I might generally ask what the purpose of this is.
You seem to want to have vimiv open with a particular directory, if not called from the command line.
However, without this feature, vimiv would simply show the current directory, i.e. the one that X was started in, which usually is $HOME. I don't see how this does not suffice.

Anyways, if you have reasons for this functionality, as I presume, it should still be possible to perform an open_with action, which could be made possible by adding '%f' again and only honoring '--start-from-desktop' if no filename is given.

Last edited by respiranto (2016-02-01 01:14:52)

karlch · 2016-02-01 15:03:11

Graphical filemanagers.. another thing I didn't test

The point behind this is to start vimiv in a specific directory when starting it from a menu, in my case i3-dmenu-desktop. It's basically my implementation of @chickenPie4tea's request for a library_default_path, which I find only makes sense if started from a graphical menu as one usually navigates the terminal before starting vimiv or pipes stuff into vimiv directly.
This is useful if one usually opens images in e.g. ~/Images (I do) and then just quickly starts vimiv without any arguments.

It obviously makes sense to open the actual file when starting from a file manager. Should be fixed in the last commit.

respiranto · 2016-02-01 18:14:48

Thanks, works fine now.

flecha · 2016-04-22 00:47:49

Great! Just started using it. Seems the best image viewer so far!

karlch · 2016-04-24 09:53:42

Wow, such warm words, thanks

Thanks to an issue opened at Github I tagged the stable version and added a non git package "vimiv" to the AUR. Feel free to use this one instead and to comment the PKGBUILD.

respiranto · 2016-04-24 10:00:17

Nice to see a stable release; small note on the PKGBUILD:
Instead of conflicting with vimiv-git both packages should conflict with vimiv and vimiv-git should provide vimiv.

By the way, are there any plans to solve the earlier described symlink issue, i.e. to change the behaviour as such that vimiv does not change the working directory to the target's one when opening a symlinked file?

karlch · 2016-04-24 10:26:17

Sounds reasonable, thank you, changed!

The plans were there, but I forgot, sorry about that. I am currently really busy with other stuff, so I won't implement any new features until I get that done. Hopefully I will be able to do a lot of work on vimiv in the summer.

Would you mind opening an issue on Github for that, if you have an account there? Otherwise I will do that myself, so I don't forget about it again...

respiranto · 2016-04-24 10:43:27

Done.

karlch · 2016-07-12 12:45:47

Alright, I finally did the code revolution and solved some issues on the fly. I have updated the vimiv-git package in the AUR and I plan to release a new version sometime later this week.

There are most likely still some hickups and bugs as the changes were rather massive

respiranto · 2016-07-12 14:51:34

Great!
I will try it soon and report any bugs I find.

respiranto · 2016-07-12 16:34:17

I get the following error upon starting vimiv:

Keyfile not found. Exiting.

And the manpages seem to be lost. I suppose this was not intended.

karlch · 2016-07-13 08:01:32

Oh, sorry, the Makefile didn't work in combination with the AUR, should be fixed now.

Installing manually via sudo make install worked fine which is what I always do, that's why I missed it...

respiranto · 2016-07-14 09:44:21

OK, thanks; now it appears to work fine.

karlch · 2016-07-16 12:55:47

Alright, I released version 0.6.

New features include:

much better tab completion
option to disable thumbnail cache
proper handling of symlinks
some other bugfixes and small changes

The really big changes are internal as the code was completely rebased. For more info and a complete changelog refer to the github page.

If there are more major bugs, I can always release a follow-up v0.6.1.

karlch · 2016-11-27 12:17:06

It has bin a bit silent here, mainly because I didn't think any of the releases where worth mentioning. But over the last weeks quite a bit has happened and I just released 0.7.2. Most of the updates concerned stability and consistency in behaviour, but there were a few new features. As always there is a complete changelog on the website.

Just to give a short overview what I am still planning to do:

Implement a --temp-basedir flag for testing which might be useful on its own for some cases
Read over the code and clean up/optimize where I see stuff to do
Basically slowly try to get this as stable as possible, heading for the 1.0

If somebody has any more feature requests or finds bugs, now would be a great time to tell me

Arch Linux

#51 2016-01-15 12:16:53

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#52 2016-01-15 13:17:55

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#53 2016-01-15 13:51:59

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#54 2016-01-15 14:05:14

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#55 2016-01-15 14:15:35

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#56 2016-01-15 14:52:40

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#57 2016-01-15 16:09:13

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#58 2016-01-15 17:48:20

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#59 2016-01-16 14:10:12

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#60 2016-01-16 14:20:17

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#61 2016-02-01 01:01:20

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#62 2016-02-01 15:03:11

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#63 2016-02-01 18:14:48

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#64 2016-04-22 00:47:49

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#65 2016-04-24 09:53:42

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#66 2016-04-24 10:00:17

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#67 2016-04-24 10:26:17

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#68 2016-04-24 10:43:27

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#69 2016-07-12 12:45:47

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#70 2016-07-12 14:51:34

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#71 2016-07-12 16:34:17

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#72 2016-07-13 08:01:32

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#73 2016-07-14 09:44:21

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#74 2016-07-16 12:55:47

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

#75 2016-11-27 12:17:06

Re: Vimiv - an image viewer with vim-like keybindings

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