an npm distribution and wrapper for viu

what

viu is a terminal image viewer written in rust that is pretty nice! this package distributes and wraps viu with npm.

how?

give this a shot:

npx @jfhbrook/viu ./buddy.jpg

or, call the API:

const viu = require('@jfhbrook/viu');

(async () => {
  await viu('buddy.jpg');
})();

no, I mean how??

before publishing, I download and unpack an official release tarball for viu and use cross to build viu for common architectures:

• linux x64
• linux aarch64
• linux arm32 (targeting raspberry pi)
• windows x64

then, after install, if there isn't a matching pre-built binary, npm will attempt to build viu from source.

finally, at runtime, if a viu binary can't be found - either pre-built or built on install - we check the PATH to see if viu is already installed for the user as a last-ditch effort.

why?!

"but josh, why don't you use sidre sorhus's terminal-image, which is in pure javascript?

terminal-image is great, but it has fewer features than viu - namely, viu supports kitty's graphics protocol in addition to iterm's.

on the other hand, this package is a little chonky - it includes a bunch of binary builds after all - and will fail when an architecture is unsupported and cargo isn't installed.

if you want the best of both worlds, consider installing both, trying viu first, and using terminal-image as a fallback.

version info

ideally, the version of this package will be the same as the version of viu that it includes. however, intermediate changes at the package level will require bumping the patch version when publishing to npm. in other words, the patch version may be ahead of viu's, but the major and minor should match.

I haven't had a need to make sweeping changes to this module; if/when I do, I'll revisit this strategy.

license

This wrapper is released under an MIT license, as is viu.