previewing files

Supported preview types

rovr supports a wide range of file types for previewing. the following are the main categories of files that can be previewed:

text files

plain text files are displayed in a text area with syntax highlighting. the language is determined by the file extension. rovr supports a wide range of languages.

unknown/binary files

mime types are automatically obtained using puremagic to give you a more accurate information of the file’s type. If you additionally have plugins.file_one enabled with plugins.file_one.get_description, you can view extra information, like how many sections, what type, etc.

bat plugin

if you have bat installed and enabled in the rovr config, it will be used to display text files with syntax highlighting for much more languages and theming.

images

rovr can display images directly in the terminal. refer to the image previews guide for more details on terminal compatibility and configuration.

folders

when a folder is selected, the preview panel will show a list of the files and folders inside it, allowing you to see the contents without navigating into it.

Tip

If you focus on the folder preview, you can navigate in there to open files and folders, letting you skip actually cd-ing into it!

archives

for archive files (like .zip, .tar.gz, .rar), rovr will display a list of the files and folders contained within the archive.

pdf

for pdf files, rovr makes use of poppler. you can also scroll through the pdf with your mouse (scrollbars are unavailable for now) or use your keyboard to navigate it.

svg

rovr makes use of resvg-py to render svg files, so you don’t need resvg installed on your system – it automatically previews the svg file for you without any setup

fonts

for font files (like .ttf, .otf), rovr will display a preview of the font. you can customise the text used in the preview if you want to test extra things

Custom preview rules

You can change the file type to preview association by modifying the [settings.preview_rules] section in your config.toml

If your mime type is accurate enough (like image/png), you can omit the check and use the mime type only:

[settings.preview_rules]
"image/png" = "image"

However, in the case of vague mime types like application/gzip, if you want to preview .svgz files as an svg instead of a failed archive file, you can use the following rule:

[settings.preview_rules."application/(x-)?gzip"]
default = "archive"
extensions = { svgz = "resvg" }

In the above example, we are telling rovr that for files with mime type application/gzip and application/x-gzip, to use archive by default, except if the file ends with .svgz, and in that case, use the svg renderer