Lightview

A blazing-fast, minimalist image viewer built with Rust.

Design Philosophy

The idea behind Lightview came from using various image viewers, each with their own strengths and limitations:

• Swappy has a clean, borderless display (in fullscreen mode) that looks great, but doesn't support navigating between images
• Sxiv offers a minimal viewing experience, but with distracting white/black borders around images
• Eye of GNOME provides useful features but comes with a heavy window decoration that detracts from the viewing experience

Lightview aims to combine the best aspects of these viewers - Swappy's clean display, Sxiv's minimalism, and useful navigation features - while avoiding their limitations. The result is a fast, minimal image viewer that lets you focus entirely on the images.

Features

• Borderless window that matches image dimensions
• Keyboard navigation between images in the same directory
• Fullscreen mode
• Supports common image formats (JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP)

Demo

Clean, borderless display

Fullscreen display

Another fullscreen display

Requirements

• Rust (latest stable)
• GTK4

Install

From AUR (Arch Linux)

yay -S lightview

From Cargo

cargo install lightview

From Source

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ltdt-apex/lightview
cd lightview

2. Build and install:

cargo install --path .

Make sure ~/.cargo/bin is in your PATH:

# For zsh users
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

# For bash users
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Usage

# View a single image
lightview path/to/image.jpg

# View all images in current directory
lightview .

# View all images in specific directory
lightview path/to/directory

Keyboard Controls

• Left Arrow: Previous image
• Right Arrow: Next image
• F: Toggle fullscreen (gallery mode)
• Q: Quit

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

License

MIT