sriv: simple rust image viewer

I vibe-coded an image viewer in Rust!

github

For years, I’ve been using simple X image viewer sxiv, and when the developer abandoned it, I switched to nsxiv. Overall, I love it because of its extremely minimalistic UI without any toolbars or GUI elements, vim-like keybindings, overall speed, and support for custom keybindings to execute custom commands. I have some commands to upload photos to my website, and to edit photos in darktable, which are super handy.

But several issues with nsxiv started to become annoying.

• It’s built on imlib2, but it crashes for large images. Since I have a 100 megapixel camera and also do line scan photography which regularly produce images over 100,000 px wide, I needed something that could handle large images.
• Thumbnailing was single threaded and really slow. With my 100 megapixel photos, it would take about a second for each thumbnail to generate. I’m not super sure about how nsxiv manages its thumbnail cache, but it would sometimes regenerate thumbnails that I’m pretty sure I’ve already generated in the past.
• It requires X11 so it doesn’t work natively in Wayland and I would occasionally get some random X-related quirks like X11 error: BadValue when using certain tiling window managers like i3.
• Configuration is via Xresources which can get reset when using XWayland.

So I created sriv which addresses these issues.

• minimalistic UI with vim-like keybindings and looks and feels almost identical to sxiv and nsxiv.
• gpu-accelerated image viewing
• parallel thumbnail generation
• supports images more than 32768 or 65536 px wide or whatever arcane limit that imlib2 has
• works in wayland natively thanks to nannou using wgpu/winit
• custom keybindings are via ~/.config/sriv/bindings.toml; configuring other stuff like background color are soon to be added

I also added some optimizations like eagerly trying to prefetch the full size image when you are browsing around in thumbnail mode.

Finally, I implemented CLIP-powered semantic search across the image library! Now I can just press / and type in what I need to find. This is incredibly useful for finding photos in my library of tens of thousands of images.

I used Codex CLI to vibe code this and the codebase is just under 3000 lines of code (still less than nsxiv‘s 5000 lines of C, although I’m standing on the shoulders of giants by pulling in enormous crates as dependencies).

Feel free to raise any issues or suggestions on GitHub!