Alternatives to viu
Rust-based terminal image viewer with native iTerm and Kitty support. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
viu
Rust-based terminal image viewer with native iTerm and Kitty support.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as viu.
Chafa
Terminal graphics renderer that displays images and animations using Unicode and ANSI.
Chafa renders images and animations with Unicode and ANSI characters and is used by other terminal tools, but it has no native Windows build listed.
ascii-image-converter
Cross-platform CLI tool that converts images and GIFs into colored terminal ASCII.
ascii-image-converter turns images and animated GIFs into colored ASCII or Braille art on Windows, macOS and Linux, instead of using native iTerm and Kitty image protocols.
jp2a
Tiny command-line tool that converts JPEG images to ASCII art.
jp2a converts only JPEG images to ASCII art and has no listed Windows build, but it is very lightweight and fits easily into shell pipelines.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Glow
Reads Markdown files in a terminal with proper formatting, and finds them for you in the current directory or git repository.
