image previews

rovr uses the textual-image package to render images directly in the terminal. this allows for a rich file preview experience.

however, image support depends on the capabilities of your terminal emulator. different terminals support different image protocols.

supported terminals

here is a summary of terminals and their support for the image protocols used by rovr:

Terminal	TGP support	Sixel support
Black Box	❌	✅
Foot	❌	✅
Gnome Terminal	❌	❌
Iterm2	❌	✅
Kitty	✅	❌
Konsole	✅	✅
Tmux	❌	✅
Visual Studio Code	❌	✅
Warp	❌	❌
Wezterm	✅	✅
Windows Console	❌	❌
Windows Terminal	❌	✅
Xterm	❌	✅

the iterm2 inline images protocol is not supported. see lnqs/textual-image #68 for more details.

configuring the image protocol

if you are using a terminal that doesn’t support the default image protocol, textual-image will fall back to a half-cell representation.

if images do not appear correctly, you can manually override the image protocol in your config.toml file.

config.toml

[settings]
image_protocol = "Sixel"

available image_protocol values are: "Auto", "TGP", "Sixel", "Halfcell", and "Unicode".

configuring the image size

this lets you configure the maximum width and height of image previews in pixels. by default, rovr sets these values to 1920 (width) and 1080 (height).

config.toml

[interface]
max_preview_image_width = 1920
max_preview_image_height = 1080

you can choose to disable this by setting either value to 0, which means the image preview will use the image as-is.

known issues

• some low-resolution images will look horrible, I’m not really sure why that happens, but it might be due to an unnecessary up-scaling attempt by textual-image
• transparent images do not get shown with a transparent background. this used to work, but textual-image is just really scuffed (beggars cant be choosers). I may take a look some day, but the internals is too advanced.