miniview

MiniView is a bare-bones image viewer intended to be used during development and testing. MiniView can be called as binary from the CLI, and used as a Rust library.

To see what it can do, and whether it would fit your purpose, please see:

• Use from the cli
• Use as library
  • Documentation: docs.rs

MiniView is not intended to be used as your primary image viewer. For that purpose, I would recommend Emulsion.

Install

Binary installation

With cargo install: cargo install miniview

Pre-build binary: see releases

Add library dependency

Run cargo add miniview with cargo-edit, or add miniview as a dependency to your Cargo.toml:

miniview = "*" # replace `*` with the latest version

Usage

Instructions for CLI use

Usage	Linux example	Windows example (cmd.exe)
miniview <PATH_TO_IMAGE>	miniview image.png	miniview image.png
miniview --from-path <PATH_TO_IMAGE>	miniview --from-path image.png	miniview --from-path image.png
miniview --from-stdin-path	echo image.png | miniview --from-stdin-path	echo image.png | miniview --from-stdin-path
miniview --from-stdin-bytes	cat image.png | miniview --from-stdin-bytes	type image.png | miniview --from-stdin-bytes

Flags & Options

Flag/Option	Description
--fullscreen	Set the window to fullscreen
--allow-window-resizing	Allow the window to resize (doesn't resize the image!)
--close-after <n>	Close the window after n milliseconds

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ESC to exit the image window.

Instructions for library use

use miniview::config::ConfigBuilder;
use std::time::Duration;

fn main() {
    let config =
        ConfigBuilder::from_path(concat!(env!("CARGO_MANIFEST_DIR"), "/resources/plant.jpg"))
            .set_fullscreen(true)
            .set_lazy_window(false)
            .build();

    let controls = MiniView::show(config).expect("unable to create miniview");

    // do some important other work!
    std::thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(1000));

    let closed = controls.close();
    assert!(closed.is_ok());
}

Backends

MiniView supports two backends: piston-window and pixels. You can switch between backends on compile time. This requires setting Cargo features. The piston-window backend can be enabled using the backend_piston_window feature, and the pixels backend can be enabled using the backend_pixels feature.

The default backend is pixels. This backend will be used if no-default-features is not specified. Note that the default backend is not available on MacOS.

The next sections provide examples, on how to enable each backend. Only one backend should be enabled at a time.

backend: piston-window

Platform support

Platform	Supported	Tested	Notes
Linux	✅	✅
MacOS			MacOS does not allow the creation of graphical windows off the main thread.
Windows	✅	✅
... other piston-window + glutin platforms	✅		Assuming graphical windows can be created off the main thread.

Configuration examples

When building MiniView, the piston-window backend can be used by compiling with:

cargo run --no-default-features --features backend_piston_window 

When using MiniView as a library, you can use:

[dependencies.miniview]
version = "*" # replace `*` with the latest version
default-features = false 
features = ["backend_piston_window"]

or

[dependencies]
miniview = { version = "*", default-features = false, features = ["backend_piston_window"] }

NB: replace * in version = "*" with any supported version.

backend: pixels

Platform support

Platform	Supported	Tested	Notes
Linux	✅	✅
Windows	✅	✅
MacOS			MacOS does not allow the creation of graphical windows off the main thread.
FreeBSD	✅
DragonflyBSD	✅
NetBSD	✅
OpenBSD	✅
... other pixels + winit platforms			Assuming graphical windows can be created off the main thread, support can be added. Please open an issue.

Configuration examples

When building MiniView, the pixels backend can be used by compiling with:

cargo run --no-default-features --features backend_pixels

When using MiniView as a library, you can use:

[dependencies.miniview]
version = "*" # replace `*` with the latest version
default-features = false 
features = ["backend_pixels"]

or

[dependencies]
miniview = { version = "*", default-features = false, features = ["backend_pixels"] }

NB: replace * in version = "*" with any supported version.

Suggestions, Questions, Bugs

Feel free to open an issue 📬 if you have a suggestion, a question or found a bug =).

🎸 🎺 🎻 🎷