New user/feature request/bugs/willing to contribute it myself

[porridgewithraisins]

New user

Saw this mentioned (by you?) on HN. Hi!

Bugs

• Segfaults when pasting URLs in an empty window. Normal text works (pasting "hello" says file not found). Pasting image works and it loads the image, but pasting URL segfaults.

Feature requests

• vipsdisp $directory to open images in that directory. e.g vipsdisp ./plots
• Thumbnail/file list(/tree) view of directory
• In case pasting URL is not actually supported and the bug above was an unintentional input that is causing the crash, pasting URLs.

Contributing

• Willing to help make these changes

Misc

• Question before I potentially embark on a fools errand, how much effort would it be for me to port this to GTK3/QT as well? I am not a fan of CSD.

[jcupitt]

Hi @porridgewithraisins, I’m on holiday right now and on mobile, I’ll write a better reply when I’m home again in 10 days.

Load from URL would be fun to add, I agree. I think the best way would be to make a VipsSource that wraps the GIO loader. I think I have some code somewhere for this.

Things like vipsdisp *.jpg should work now. It’ll load that set of filenames and let you flip between them with alt-left and alt-right, or the < > buttons in the title bar.

There’s no gallery view, but the file browser can usually do this.

I don’t think a gtk3 rewrite is a good idea. Gtk3 is a dead end now and it shouldn’t be used for new projects.

A qt rewrite would be a lot of work! Personally, I want to keep vipsdisp as a C project with gtk4, since it’s the view component of nip4, my image processing spreadsheet:

https://github.com/jcupitt/nip4

But of course do make a qt version yourself.

[jcupitt]

Oh, this is a better introduction to nip4:

https://www.libvips.org/2025/03/20/introduction-to-nip4.html

It might help explain some of the vipsdisp design choices.

[MorsMortium]

https://codeberg.org/MorsMortium/GTK4-NoCSD

[jcupitt]

Hi again @porridgewithraisins, sorry, things happened and I forgot the followup.

vipsdisp $directory to open images in that directory. e.g vipsdisp ./plots

You can use wildcards for this, is that enough?

Thumbnail/file list(/tree) view of directory

I agree, some kind of gallery view would be useful.

vipsdisp splits tile pyramids from the images which generate their pixels, so you could have 100 small pyramids for the thumnbnail pixels and a few tilesources which filled them on demand. It should be easy to put them into a list store and have a scrolling view.

In case pasting URL is not actually supported and the bug above was an unintentional input that is causing the crash, pasting URLs.

I think this should be pretty simple. libvips has VipsSourceGInputStream, a vips source object which wraps a GInputStream:

https://github.com/libvips/libvips/blob/master/libvips/iofuncs/sourceginput.c

You'd just need to open the URL with GIO to get a GInputStream, use that to make a VipsSource, then pass that source object to vips_image_new_from_source().

how much effort would it be for me to port this to GTK3/QT as well? I am not a fan of CSD.

Another option would be to change the .ui for the main window:

https://github.com/jcupitt/vipsdisp/blob/master/src/gtk/imagewindow.ui#L132-L199

Swap the GtkHeaderBar component for whatever design you prefer. Gtk4 does not force a combined header bar, I just used it because I was trying to follow the HIG.

https://developer.gnome.org/hig/

[porridgewithraisins]

Nice, makes sense.

things happened

Same, except things are happening, present tense. I'll leave a better reply later after looking at the references you pointed out.

Thank you!