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".

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
• opaque 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.