pqiv is a powerful GTK-based command-line image viewer with a minimal UI. It is highly customizable, can be fully controlled from scripts, and has support for various file formats including PDF, Postscript, video files and archives. It is optimized to be quick and responsive.
It comes with support for animations, slideshows, transparency, VIM-like key bindings, automated loading of new images as they appear, external image filters, marks, image preloading, and much more.
pqiv started as a Python rewrite of qiv avoiding imlib, but evolved into a much more powerful tool. Today, pqiv stands for powerful quick image viewer.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Recursive loading from directories.
- Can watch files and directories for changes.
- Sorts images in natural order.
- Has a status bar showing information on the current image.
- Comes with transparency support.
- Can move/zoom/rotate/flip images.
- Can pipe images through external filters.
- Loads the next image in the background for quick response times.
- Caches zoomed images for smoother movement.
- Supports fade image transition animations.
- Supports various image and video formats through a rich set of backends.
- Comes with an interactive montage mode (a.k.a. “image grid”).
- Customizable key-bindings with support for VIM-like key sequences, action cycling and binding multiple actions to a single key.
- Mark/unmark images and pipe the list of marked images to an external script.
Website: github.com/phillipberndt/pqiv
Support:
Developer: Phillip Berndt
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

pqiv is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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