What does HackerNews think of viu?

The cross-platform GUI toolkit I personally prefer is Qt. Bein' I'ma "Python guy" I tend to interact with Qt mainly via PyQt/PySide, but there's handy bindings for a ton of other cross-platform programming languages as well. I've also recently(ish) discovered and been thoroughly impressed by Will McGugan's "Rich" library and the "Textual" TUI library he built for it. Been sprucing up all my terminal output to be more modern using those two lately.

> "The achilles heel of terminal UIs is that they can't display images."

That statement is not entirely 100% accurate these days, thanks to some really creative hacks over the years. I'll list a few links where some fun examples live. ;)

[1] https://github.com/atanunq/viu

[2] https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer

[3] https://askubuntu.com/questions/97542/how-do-i-make-my-termi...

[4] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/35333/what-is-the-f...

> And what exactly is the use case for this?

Terminal User Interfaces. There's technically no reason i can't check out an image in a folder when i'm browsing on an SSH session (yes i know i can rsync/scp && xdg-open but it's not exactly as fast to type as viu [0].

> powerful, optimized, tested, reliable software that enables me to work with terminal and GUI functionality side by side

If you have tested and reliable desktop environments to recommend, i'm all ears. All the ones i've tried over the years have their own quirks and memory leaks (yes, that includes GNOME and KDE).

But as you said, both approaches are complementary. I'm glad notcurses exists and works via graceful degradation, so people with a modern terminal can get the best while others can still get a featureful ncurses-like experience.

[0] https://github.com/atanunq/viu

Those ones use half-height blocks I think, which goes a loooong way already.

https://github.com/sindresorhus/terminal-image-cli

https://github.com/atanunq/viu