It's like cat but for images.

On macOS:

brew install eddieantonio/eddieantonio/imgcat

Important: See below if you're using iTerm2 3.0 with shell integration installed.

For other platforms, see Build.

imgcat some_image.jpg

See the manpage for more invocations.

If you install iTerm2's shell integration, chances are you also installed its additional scripts, including one called imgcat. iTerm's imgcat overrides this program by default. To see if this is happening to you, use which to determine where your shell is finding imgcat:

which imgcat

If it says imgcat: aliased to /Users/yourusername/.iterm2/imgcat, then you must edit your shell startup file and add unalias imgcat after the line that sources iTerm2's script. For example:

test -e ${HOME}/.iterm2_shell_integration.zsh && source ${HOME}/.iterm2_shell_integration.zsh
unalias imgcat

You must use git clone --recurse-submodules to clone this repository with its dependency, CImg:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/eddieantonio/imgcat.git

To build from source, you need the following:

• GNU make
• pkg-config
• ncurses with header files

On Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/etc. you can get these packages with this command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libncurses5-dev

These dependencies are not necessary, but if pkg-config manages to find a compatible version on the system, imgcat will link to it!

• libpng (any 1.x version supported by CImg)
• libjpeg (any version supported by CImg)

On Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/etc. you can get these packages with this command:

sudo apt-get install libpng-dev libjpeg-dev

Then:

./configure
make

To install to /usr/local:

make install

To change the default prefix, simply provide PREFIX=... to make install:

make install PREFIX=/opt

• Uses the CImg, distributed under the CeCILL-C license.
• 256 Color chart and data from Jason Milkin's public domain chart.

Copyright © 2014–2023 Eddie Antonio Santos. Distributed under the terms of the ISC license.