How to display images in OSX terminal

Question

How do I display images in the terminal? I am on Mac OSX mountain lion (10.8.5), and the answers in this question don't work on OSX. Is it possible at all?

Solution 1

• xdg-open to open a viewer from terminal
• convert to ascii art asciiview
• use vlc to output video as ascii art

Solution 2

pxl is the best tool I have found for xterm-256color terminals.

iTerm has specific tools to inline images (search iTerm imgcat and imgls) but those are kind of cheats (that work great :D).

gif-cli works for GIFs, but ... not well at all. Its author has tools for videos and images, too.

pxl:

imgcat: Just shows the image, with no scaling or anything. The screenshot was bigger than SO's limit, unfortunately. (SO should include a compression mechanism. 🙄) Supports a variety of formats, including animated GIFs.

Update: Kitty is a cross-platform terminal emulator that supports custom protocols that allow it to render bitmaps. It's very feature-rich, I suggest you try it.

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Comments

[Jesse K]

stackoverflow.com/questions/12233105/…

[ctrl-alt-delor]

Have you installed them. I know 100% that you can get vlc for mac.

[Wildcard]

@John, if you want to just use existing Mac tools without installing anything, why not just use the terminal command open on the image files to open them in Preview?

[John Militer]

I would like to install available tools to do that. Please tell me the url's for them

[ctrl-alt-delor]

I use apt-get and these URLs: http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/. If you are using Mac, or Microsoft, then you have to do it the hard way (does mac have a package manager?)

[jamescampbell]

pxl is my new favorite, really nice go get away install too. Thanks