TerminalImage

TerminalImage is a library to show images on terminals. Currently, this library supports iTerm2 and terminals with libsixel installed. On other terminals, images fall back to 24-bit ANSI colors (see Fallback).

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'terminal_image'

Terminals other than iTerm2:

Please install libsixel's img2sixel command following https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel#install

Usage

# Print image by File object
TerminalImage.show(File.open('your-image-path.png'))

# Print image from URL
TerminalImage.show_url('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/unhappychoice/terminal_image/master/images/sample.png')

# Get encoded string ready to be displayed 
string = TerminalImage.encode(File.open('your-image-path.png'))

# Get encoded string ready to be displayed from URL
string = TerminalImage.encode_url('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/unhappychoice/terminal_image/master/images/sample.png')

Fallback

When the terminal is not iTerm2 and img2sixel is not installed, images are drawn with 24-bit ("truecolor") ANSI colors. Each character cell is an upper half block (▀): the foreground color is one pixel and the background color is the pixel below it. The image is scaled down to the terminal width (IO.console, then $COLUMNS, then 80 columns) and is never scaled up. Transparent pixels keep the terminal's default background.

Supported formats:

• PNG is decoded with the pure-Ruby chunky_png gem and needs nothing else.
• Other formats (JPEG, GIF, WebP, ...) are converted to PNG with the ImageMagick CLI (magick, or convert for ImageMagick 6) when it is installed. Only the first frame of an animated image is shown. Without ImageMagick they raise TerminalImage::UnsupportedFormat, a subclass of TerminalImage::UnsupportedTerminal.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/unhappychoice/terminal_image. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the TerminalImage project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.

Author

@unhappychoice