Alternatives to feh
Lightweight, keyboard-driven image viewer for X11 that also sets wallpapers and lists image files. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
feh
Lightweight, keyboard-driven image viewer for X11 that also sets wallpapers and lists image files.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as feh.
nsxiv
A minimal keyboard-driven image viewer for X11 with a thumbnail mode, forked from sxiv.
nsxiv is a minimal keyboard-driven X11 viewer with a thumbnail mode, configured by editing source and recompiling, and does not set wallpapers.
Swayimg
A customizable image viewer for Wayland compositors and DRM with Lua scripting, gallery and slideshow modes.
Swayimg is a Linux viewer for Wayland compositors and DRM rather than X11, with Lua scripting, gallery and slideshow modes and support for JPEG XL, HEIC and RAW.
vimiv
An image viewer controlled with vim-like keybindings, with a thumbnail mode and basic editing.
vimiv is a Linux image viewer using vim-style keybindings with a thumbnail mode and basic editing built in, though the bindings take time to learn.
qimgv
A fast, configurable image viewer with basic cropping and resizing and optional video playback.
qimgv is a keyboard-friendly GPL-3.0 viewer for Windows and Linux with copy and move shortcuts for sorting, basic crop and resize, and optional mpv video playback.
nomacs
A fast image viewer that opens RAW and PSD files and can show the same picture in two synchronised windows.
nomacs opens RAW and PSD files, synchronises zoom across windows and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, but exposes many panels at once.
ImageGlass
A fast image viewer that opens the formats Windows still argues about: WebP, JXL, HEIC, AVIF, SVG, HDR and raw.
ImageGlass opens over ninety formats with crop and resize tools on Windows, macOS and Linux, though its non-Windows builds are newer and some features are paid.
Ristretto
A simple, fast image viewer developed as part of the Xfce desktop environment for Linux.
Ristretto is a lightweight Xfce image viewer for Linux with a plain graphical interface, offering viewing only without editing, wallpaper or scripting features.
Loupe
GNOME's default image viewer, with metadata display and quick crop, rotate and flip edits.
Loupe is GNOME's default viewer with metadata display and quick crop, rotate and flip edits, trading keyboard-driven minimalism for a modern desktop interface.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
ImageMagick
A command-line image toolkit that creates, edits, converts and composes images across more than 200 formats.
Geeqie
Browse and organize images with a Unix desktop viewer.
XnConvert
A cross-platform batch image converter that resizes, edits and converts photos in bulk.
MComix
An open-source GTK image viewer designed for reading comic books and manga from archives.
ExifTool
Reads, writes and edits metadata in almost every image, audio and video format there is, and is the reference tool for the job.
