image.nvim

Image Viewer as ASCII Art for Neovim, written in Lua

Features

• Supports many file formats (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, .webp, ...)
• Colored images
• Almost no code runs on startup
• Rendering with a dither method makes images more visible than traditional ascii art
• Images are centered and have labels!

How does it work?

When you open an image file (e.g. portrait.png), the open buffer becomes non-editable and non-saveable to ensure the file contents won't be overwritten. Then the buffer is filled with the ascii art generated by ascii-image-converter. I found out that a plugin similiar to this was already implemented for vim in vimscript: image.vim, so you can consider this a modern, lua version.

Prerequisites

• Install ascii-image-converter and make sure it is in your path
• plenary.nvim
• baleia.nvim (optional for color support)
• Neovim 0.7+

Install

With packer

use {
  'samodostal/image.nvim',
  requires = {
    'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim'
  },
},

With vim.plug

Plug 'samodostal/image.nvim'
Plug 'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim'

Setup

-- Require and call setup function somewhere in your init.lua
require('image').setup {
  render = {
    min_padding = 5,
    show_label = true,
    use_dither = true,
    foreground_color = false,
    background_color = false
  },
  events = {
    update_on_nvim_resize = true,
  },
}

Colors support:

Colors are turned off by default.

• The reason for colors not being on by default is a significant delay when opening images + an additional dependency: plugin baleia.nvim (no need to call setup, only install)
• Enable optionsrender.foreground_color and render.background_color
• render.background_color setting is a nice addition that enables colors not only for characters, but also for the space behind them.