How do I make my terminal display graphical pictures?

Question

This is a quick mockup i copy and pasted together. I imagine this being super cool and useful.

Does something like this exist already?

Answer 1

You cant do so in a terminal, but you can do so in a tty using fbi. You need a framebuffer to allow this to work

sudo apt-get install fbi

Go to a virtualterminal(TTY) and enter fbi <filname>

It should show your image

Answer 2

There's actually such a project named TermKit, if you'd like to test it - check out http://blog.easytech.com.ar/2011/05/21/playing-with-termkit-with-chrome/ but it's quite unfinished (since you seem to have a Mac, you should try the Mac-version since it's "the original")

So yes, it's an idea worth exploring, however - the switch between graphical and text-only mode must be quick since I don't always need the images viewed. Also - it needs to be fully compatible with e.g. Vim..

Answer 3

This does not exist; gnome-terminal is only capable of diplaying text, at least as far as I know.

However, you can call an image viewer from the commandline to see your pictures in a particular folder. So, going off of your mockup above showing you listing all .jpg pictures in the current folder, you can use Eye of GNOME (Ubuntu's default image viewer) from the commandline for something similar:

eog *.jpg &

Note that the window which comes up will only show one image at a time, though you can use the provided arrow buttons to cycle between them.

Answer 4

I wrote a tool to do this. I named mine Show Image In Terminal ("shit"). It assumes you have a 256 color term and UTF8 support, and it's written in perl. I drop it in my ~/bin. It assumes you have Image::Magick, Term::Size, Getopt::Long and Time:HiRes, which should all be available in your distro's repositories, or CPAN. My intent was to ssh into my house, and quickly view images without launching a display over X. Script scales to appropriate width/height for the terminal you are in. I used UTF8 characters to effectively double the vertical resolution of your terminal, which really helps clarity. YMMV.

Sample shots here

Source code here

Answer 5

Maybe caca is what you want. For images:

sudo apt-get install caca-utils
cacaview /PATH/TO/image.jpg

Make sure your terminal window is big enough.

I sometimes used it for fun to watch videos as ASCII in mplayer :) Like this:

mplayer -vo caca /PATH/TO/video.mpg

Answer 6

Check out terminology, the console from Enlightenment. It's capable of what you are asking...see this video:

http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology

Not sure how much is capable outside of Enlightenment, but they have a ppa for it.

https://launchpad.net/~efl/+archive/trunk