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The xzgv manual

1 Overview

xzgv is a picture viewer for X, with a thumbnail-based file selector. The thumbnails used (thumbnails being small ‘preview’ versions of the pictures) are compatible with xv, zgv, and the Gimp. The kinds of pictures xzgv allows to be viewed are raster-format pictures (sometimes called ‘bitmaps’ and/or ‘pixmaps’); things like GIF files, JPEG files, PNG files, and so on.

Most of the time, you will probably want to use xzgv’s file selector (see The File Selector) to pick which file(s) to view. This is what appears on the left-hand side of the window when you start xzgv as just xzgv (see Invoking xzgv). It displays a list of subdirectories and picture files in the current directory, along with small ‘thumbnail’ versions of the pictures if they exist. (If no thumbnails appear in a given directory, or if they are missing for some files, you can create/update them by pressing u. See Updating Thumbnails.)

When you’ve picked a file to view, you can view it by clicking on it, or pressing Enter. This reads the picture and displays it in the right-hand part of the window, the viewer (see The Viewer). You can then move around the picture (if it is larger than will fit) by dragging it with the mouse, or using the scrollbars, or the cursor keys. You can then select another image with the file selector (though you need to press Esc or Tab first if using the keyboard), or you can quit xzgv by pressing q.

While xzgv works much like any other X program, and is certainly mouse-friendly :-), it’s also designed to be keyboard-friendly. Everything in xzgv can be done entirely from the keyboard. Much of this keyboard support works like the original zgv (a similar console-based picture viewer for Linux).

This overview is, as you might expect, only the very simplest of introductions to what xzgv can do, and describes only a very basic use of xzgv. xzgv can do a lot more; read on to find out what.

2 Acknowledgements

xzgv was primarily written by Russell Marks, also the author of this manual. It is maintained by Reuben Thomas, who ported it to Gtk+ 2.

Costa Sapuntzakis contributed code for much faster JPEG thumbnail generation (to zgv, which I adapted for xzgv).

The directory/file icons used were loosely based on gmc’s dir-close.xpm. I think Tuomas Kuosmanen was responsible for that, judging from the change log.

mkinstalldirs is straight from the texinfo package, and was written by Noah Friedman. (This is also used during installation.)

Huge thanks go to the many people responsible for GTK+, without which xzgv would almost certainly not have happened. (But no thanks for Electric Eyes, which was nearly nice enough for me not to bother with xzgv at all! :-))

getopt*.[ch] are from the GNU libc.

3 Invoking xzgv

Normally you’d invoke xzgv as plain xzgv (perhaps via a window manager menu, or GNOME/KDE menu, etc.). However, you can directly specify files to view, or a start directory, on the command-line. In addition, there are various options.

(If you’re new to xzgv, you should probably skip the rest of this section for now and come back to it later.)

The general format of the xzgv command-line goes roughly like this:

xzgv [options] [dir | file ...]

Two types of options are supported — the traditional Unix single-letter options, and GNU-style long options. Most options can be used in either way, and both forms are listed in the table below.

Note that all options are processed after any configuration file(s). Config file settings are just like the long-option names below minus the -- (see Configuring xzgv), though a few command-line options are not permitted as config file settings (e.g. help), and vice versa.

Here’s what the options do:

-a

--auto-hide

Automatically hide selector when a picture is selected, allowing the viewer to use the whole window.

--careful-jpeg

Enable libjpeg ‘fancy upsampling’. xzgv defaults to using the faster method; as the libjpeg documentation puts it, “The visual impact of the sloppier method is often very small.”

--delete-single-prompt

(Note that this is normally enabled; use --delete-single-prompt=off to disable it.) If disabled, xzgv will immediately delete a file when told to, without prompting for confirmation. (It’s single because deleting multiple files at once will be supported in future, and that will have a separate prompt override.)

--dither-hicol

Use dithering in 15/16-bit, whatever the default setting is. See Viewer Options, for a discussion of benefits/drawbacks. You can also use --dither-hicol=off to disable this.

--exif-orient

In JPEG files, use Exif orientation tags (inserted by e.g. digital cameras) to correct image orientation before display. See Viewer Options, for details.

--fast-recursive-update

When doing a recursive thumbnail update, don’t read existing thumbnails before updating. This is pretty much obsolete as of xzgv 0.7, as the speed increase is now negligible. But, it may still be useful if you want to update a huge number of small directories for which few if any updates are needed.

-f

--fullscreen

Run fullscreen, using the entire screen for xzgv’s window, without even any window-manager decorations (window frame, title bar, etc.) if possible.

-g geom

--geometry geom

Set the xzgv window’s geometry (position and/or size) to geom. The geometry string should be in the usual X format, with the extension that positions/sizes may have a % suffix meaning that they are treated as percentages of the screen width/height. The default geometry is 92%x85%.

For those unfamiliar with the way ‘geometry’ works, here’s a brief description of the syntax. It’s WxH, or +X+Y, or WxH+X+Y, where W is width, H height, X the x position, and Y the y position. The first form specifies only the size, the second only the position — the WxH+X+Y form specifies both.

Now, the +X+Y bit normally specifies where the top-left of the window is. But you can use - instead of + for the x and/or y position, in which case it specifies the gap between the right/bottom of the window and the right/bottom of the screen. (Note, however, that any window frame your window manager adds to the window is disregarded in this calculation, so you may need to experiment somewhat to get the desired position.) You can also use negative numbers with both + and - — so +-50+0 puts the window partly off the left of the screen, and +0--50 puts it partly off the bottom of the screen — but this is of questionable value. :-)

Finally, as mentioned above, xzgv extends this syntax by allowing you to use % to specify percentages of the screen width/height rather than pixels, e.g. 50%x30%-30%-20%. It also allows you to use real numbers such as 12.34, which can be useful with %.

-h

--help

Display a list of options and a terse description of what the options do.

--image-bigness-threshold numpix

Set the boundary numpix after which images are considered ‘big’, and are no longer rendered all-at-once (which gives much nicer scrolling, but is harder on memory and can be slow for big images) but are instead rendered piece-by-piece. Units are number of pixels in image (i.e. width times height), and the default is 2000000 pixels.

-i

--images-only

Shows only directories and image file types in the selector, identified by their extensions.

--interpolate

Interpolate between the picture’s pixels when scaling up (see Scaling). This usually looks nicer, but it’s rather slow.

--mouse-scale-x

If enabled, control-clicking on the viewer scales only the X axis. (The default is to scale only the Y axis.)

--revert-orient

(Note that this is normally enabled; use --revert-orient=off to disable it.) If disabled, orientation (flip/mirror/rotate) state is retained between pictures (see Viewer Options).

--revert-scale

(Note that this is normally enabled; use --revert-scale=off to disable it.) If disabled, scaling is retained between pictures (see Viewer Options).

--selector-width

Set the default/initial size of the selector in pixels. The normal setting is 200.

-T

--show-tagged

Show names of currently-tagged files on exiting xzgv. (They’re listed to stdout, one per line.) This can be useful when you want to select multiple files graphically and work on them with something else.

--show-thumbnail-messages

Show on the status bar when thumbnails are being read. The status bar must be enabled for these messages to be visible, of course. :-)

-k

--skip-parent

For the first directory shown, skip the cursor past .. (the parent dir). This can be useful when you’d like to immediately use space to ‘page’ through the dir.

-o order

--sort-order order

Set the initial sorting order used in the selector. Possible settings are name, ext, size, and date (or time); only the first char of the setting (n/e/s/d/t) need be given. The default is name order.

--sort-timestamp-type type

Set the timestamp type to use when using time/date sorting order. Possible settings are ‘mtime’ (default), ‘ctime’, and ‘atime’; only the first char of the setting (m/c/a) need be given.

--statusbar

Show a status bar below the selector; this, for example, says when a picture is being read.

-t

--thin-rows

Use rows a third the normal height in the selector. This can be very useful on lower-resolution screens, or if you’re really interested in filenames, not thumbnails.

-v

--version

Show version number.

--version-gtk

Show version number of GTK+ xzgv is using.

-z

--zoom

Fit picture to viewer window, whatever its actual size (see Zoom Mode).

-r

--zoom-reduce-only

When in zoom mode, only reduce pictures to fit; i.e. make big pictures viewable all-at-once while leaving small picures intact.

-p

--zoom-panorama

When in zoom mode, adjust only the most proportional dimension to fit, and allow scrolling on the other dimension; i.e. like a fit page width option in PDF readers, but not limited to horizontal adjusting.

If started with xzgv files, xzgv hides the file selector and treats the file or files as if they were the sole contents of a directory. (It also automatically loads the first file.) As such, you can use the Next Image and Previous Image commands to navigate between the images, or do Exit to Selector and use the selector directly.

If started with xzgv start-dir, xzgv starts up as usual, but with the selector starting on the directory specified (rather than the current directory).

Settings which are either on or off (boolean) are, as you might expect, enabled by using e.g. -z or --zoom. However, there’s an alternative long-option form for setting these, resembling how they’re set in config files — the syntax is --option=state, where state is on/y/yes/1 to enable the option, or off/n/no/0 to disable it. The most useful thing about this is that it allows you to disable options which were previously enabled, by using e.g. --zoom=off.

(Readers used to the way GNU-style long options work should note that, since this on/off/etc. arg is optional, you can’t use the --option arg form in this case; it must be --option=arg for it to work.)

4 A Note on Notation

Much of this manual is taken up by a description of xzgv’s various commands in its file selector and viewer. Most of these are available both from the keyboard, and from popup menus. (A popup menu appears when you press F10 or Menu, or right-click on the selector or the viewer; each has its own menu.) So in the manual, you will often see things rather like this:

key

Selector menu, Menu the item is in, Menu item

Description of what the key/menu item does.

Sometimes the key given has a (Selector) or (Viewer) suffix; this is because some keypresses in xzgv are specific to the selector or the viewer, and won’t work unless the relevant part of xzgv has the keyboard focus.

5 The File Selector

Usually, on starting up xzgv, you’ll want to use the file selector — the list of files on the left. (The other subwindow (on the right) is the viewer.) The selector lets you pick files to view (among other things). It lists the subdirectories and picture files in the current directory, along with small ‘thumbnail’ versions of the pictures if they exist.

5.1 The Selector Menu

Almost all selector commands are available from the selector’s pop-up menu, which appears when you right-click anywhere on the selector. (You can also press F10 or Menu to bring up the menu, but as there are keyboard shortcuts for just about everything in xzgv, this isn’t often that useful. :-))

Usually, it doesn’t matter where on the selector you right-click. However, a few commands on the ‘File’ menu operate on a single file, the one selected by the keyboard cursor. A problem when using the mouse, you might think — but when you right-click on the selector, as well as popping up the menu, xzgv moves this cursor to the file you right-clicked on (if any). (You can see this by the way a hollow box is drawn around the file.) So to use e.g. ‘Details’ on the ‘File’ menu, you need to right-click on the file you want details on.

Both the selector and viewer have ‘Help’ menus, most items of which refer you to this manual:

F1

Selector menu, Help, Contents

Viewer menu, Help, Contents

View the manual’s overall contents.

Selector menu, Help, The File Selector

View the manual’s section on the file selector.

Viewer menu, Help, The Viewer

View the manual’s section on the viewer.

Selector menu, Help, Index

Viewer menu, Help, Index

View the manual’s concept index.

Selector menu, Help, About

Viewer menu, Help, About

Give some brief information about xzgv, including the version number and homepage.

Currently, the way xzgv lets you read the manual is a bit crude; it runs the info program (see Standalone info program) in an xterm.

5.2 Exiting xzgv

You can exit xzgv either by using one of two exit keypresses, or by selecting the appropriate option from the selector’s popup menu:

q

Ctrl-q

Selector menu, Exit xzgv

Quit xzgv.

(There’s also an exit option on the selector’s ‘File’ menu (Selector menu, File, Exit), as ‘Exit’ is generally on any File menu.)

5.3 Thumbnails

(This section is deliberately early on in the manual, as thumbnails are probably the most important feature of the file selector, so it’s best that you know how to create/update them sooner rather than later.)

Thumbnails are small versions of the pictures they represent, and are displayed by the file selector if they exist. xzgv uses xv-compatible thumbnails — if you create thumbnails with xv they will work with xzgv, and vice versa. xzgv’s thumbnails are also compatible with the Gimp, and zgv.

If no thumbnail exists for a file, a small ‘document’ icon appears instead (similar to the ‘folder’ icon used for directories).

5.3.1 Updating Thumbnails

While thumbnails can be made relatively quickly, it’s by no means an instant process. For this reason, thumbnails have to be created in advance, and are stored as files in their own right in a subdirectory .xvpics.

xzgv never creates/updates thumbnails without you telling it to. So, if you enter a directory where the picture files don’t have any thumbnails, or where the thumbnails seem to be out of date, you should press u, or select ‘Update Thumbnails’ from the selector’s menu. (Even if the thumbnails can’t be written (say, if you don’t have permission to write them), the selector will still show the updated thumbnails until you leave the directory.)

Alternatively, you can create/update thumbnails for the current directory and all subdirectories by using Alt-u or ‘Recursive Update’. But be warned that a recursive update can take some time!

u

Selector menu, Update Thumbnails

Create thumbnails for any files which don’t have them, and update thumbnails which are older than the corresponding file. While this is going on, a window appears showing how far through the process xzgv is.

While the update is in progress, you can abort it by clicking on the ‘Cancel’ button, or pressing Esc or Enter, or by clicking the delete-window button (if your window manager provides one) on the title bar. xzgv will stop once it has finished the thumbnail it is currently working on (if any).

Alt-u

Selector menu, Recursive Update

Create/update thumbnails for all files in the current directory and all subdirectories. This can take some time, so you are prompted to confirm you really want to do this (see Dialog Boxes). Progress is indicated in much the same way as for a normal update, but only for the directory currently being updated — the overall progress is not indicated, other than by the current dir being (as ever) displayed in the main window’s title. You can abort a recursive thumbnail update in the same ways as for a normal update (see above).

By default, xzgv behaves a little oddly when doing a recursive update, to give some consistency with the normal update. See Thumbnail Issues, for details.

5.3.2 Thumbnail Issues

Dealing with thumbnails can be ‘interesting’ at times, and there are a few ways this influences things:

• - xzgv doesn’t read the thumbnails in a directory all at once. Instead, it just reads the directory contents, then starts up what is effectively a kind of background task to read in the thumbnails. So xzgv may not be quite as responsive as usual for a short time after entering a directory with many thumbnails (say, a few hundred) — but on the other hand, at least it is responding. :-)
• - The ‘background task’ makes a special effort to show thumbnails for the files currently visible in the selector first, no matter how much you move around the list, but it reads them all in eventually.
• - The thumbnails used in xzgv require 256 colours to display. This can be a problem if you’re running X in 256 colours or less as, even if you’re running an 8-bit (256 colour) server, there will almost inevitably be fewer colours available. Currently, xzgv just uses whatever gdk reports as the closest match to each individual colour used in thumbnails. This gives a tolerable result on 8-bit servers, assuming gdk was able to allocate a large number of colours; however, it gives terrible results if it couldn’t, or if running on 4-bit or 1-bit servers. Sorry about this — it should be fixed in future (either by using gdk to draw the thumbnail pixmaps, or by dithering them ‘by hand’ to suit the colours available).
• - Finally, when doing a recursive thumbnail update, xzgv (by default) reads existing thumbnails in a directory before updating any. Or rather, it reads thumbnails for those files currently visible in the selector. This can slow things down very slightly, but keeps the ‘look and feel’ consistent with the normal update. (Still, you can disable this with the --fast-recursive-update command-line option (see Invoking xzgv) or equivalent config file entry (see Configuring xzgv).)

5.4 Selector Layout and Resizing

The file selector is simply a list of subdirectories and filenames, along with any thumbnails that exist for them. The list is normally in asciibetical order (but you can change this; see Changing the Sorting Order). Names of directories are shown first, and they are shown in order at the beginning of the list, before all the picture files. Long filenames may not fit in the visible part of the file selector display; if so, there will be a horizontal scrollbar you can use to see the rest of the name(s) (you can use cursor left/right to do this from the keyboard).

The list is very often larger than can fit on the screen at once. If this is the case, only part is shown at a time, but you can move around the list using the (vertical) scrollbar, or with cursor up/down and the like.

If you find the selector window to be too small vertically, and would like to see more files at once, you can start xzgv fullscreen by using the ‘-f’ option (see Invoking xzgv), and/or use ‘thin rows’ mode (see File Selector Options).

If you find the selector too small (or too big) horizontally, you can change this by moving the splitter line’s ‘handle’ (a small square button between the selector and viewer, near the bottom of the window), which changes the relative sizes of the selector and viewer. You can move it by dragging it with the mouse, or with these keys:

[

Move the window split left.

Ctrl-[

Move the window split left more slowly.

]

Move the window split right.

Ctrl-]

Move the window split right more slowly.

~

Reset the window split to its default position.

You can also set the initial/default size of the selector — in effect, the position of the window split — using --selector-width (see Invoking xzgv) or the config file option selector-width.

5.5 Moving Around The List

This section is mainly for those of us more inclined to the keyboard side of the force. :-) Mouse-happy types can freely skip it.

When the selector has the keyboard focus, the cursor (or in GTK+ jargon, the ‘focus row’) is normally shown as a hollow box around one of the list’s rows. This serves the following functions:

• - It selects a file for view commands to operate on.
• - It determines which part of the list is shown, as the part of the list shown onscreen always contains the cursor (unless you move around using the mouse).

There are several commands for moving the cursor. In summary, most ‘special’ keys like the cursors do what you’d imagine they do, but in more detail:

Cursor Up

k

Move up.

Cursor Down

j

Move down.

Page Up

Ctrl-u

Move the cursor back roughly a page.

Page Down

Ctrl-v

Move the cursor forward roughly a page.

Ctrl-Home

Ctrl-a

Move the cursor to the start of the list.

Ctrl-End

Ctrl-e

Move the cursor to the end of the list.

g

'

Move the cursor to the first filename starting with the next key pressed, which would generally be a letter or number. Case is significant; a and A are different. If no key is pressed within 2 seconds, the command is cancelled.

If no files start with the specified character, it moves to the first file which starts with a later char (in asciibetical order). If there are none for which this is the case, it moves to the last file — unless there are no files (just directories), in which case it has no effect.

5.6 Viewing a File

To view a file from the selector, you can click on it, or press Enter after moving the cursor to the relevant file, or right-click on the file and choose ‘File’ then ‘Open’.

Enter

Left-click-on-file

Selector menu, File, Open

View the chosen picture file, or if a subdirectory is chosen, make that the current directory.

See The Viewer, for details of how the viewer works.

5.7 Dialog Boxes

If xzgv has a serious problem reading a file, it will give an error. Errors are shown in dialogs which appear in the middle of the screen — they stay there until you click ‘Ok’ (or press Enter or Esc).

xzgv also uses similar dialog boxes for other things:

• - Getting confirmation that you want to do something. Enter or y picks ‘yes’; Esc or n picks no. (Again, you can click on the relevant button with the mouse to do the same.)
• - Showing progress when updating a thumbnail. This is a slightly unusual dialog, in that it automatically disappears when the update is complete. However, it does provide a ‘Cancel’ button which you can click to abort the update (pressing Enter or Esc does the same).
• - Reading a directory name. Here you should type the directory name then click ‘Ok’ (or press Enter), or click ‘Cancel’ (or press Esc) to abort. The text-input ‘widget’ used allows a certain amount of editing, including these keys:

  Cursor Left

  Ctrl-b

  Move the cursor left. (A vertical bar shows the cursor position.)

  Cursor Right

  Ctrl-f

  Move the cursor right.

  Home

  Ctrl-a

  Move the cursor to the start of the line.

  End

  Ctrl-e

  Move the cursor to the end of the line.

  Backspace

  Ctrl-h

  Delete char to the left of the cursor. (Note that Backspace is (usually) the key above the main Enter key; it is often labelled simply as an arrow.)

  Delete

  Ctrl-d

  Delete the char the cursor is on.

  You can also set the X selection (by selecting text with the mouse, or holding Shift while moving the cursor) to allow pasting text into other programs, and you can cut/copy/paste text in the usual ways:

  Shift-Delete

  Ctrl-x

  Cut text.

  Ctrl-Insert

  Ctrl-c

  Copy text.

  Shift-Insert

  Ctrl-v

  Paste text.

  You can paste text from (some) other programs using the latter command, too.

5.8 Closing a File

Usually, when you view a file, the viewer subwindow keeps displaying it until you view a different file. However, if you ‘close’ the file, the viewer stops displaying the file and returns to its initial state.

Ctrl-w

Selector menu, File, Close

‘Close’ the currently-viewed file, clearing the viewer subwindow.

5.9 File Details

The listing the selector gives for a file is pretty sparse — just the filename and (if the file has one) the accompanying thumbnail. While this does keep things simple, you sometimes want to know how much space a file takes up, when it was last modified, the dimensions of the image, that kind of thing. So, you can show details of a single file using the ‘file details’ command:

:

;

Selector menu, File, Details

Show various details about the file pointed to by the keyboard cursor. See The Selector Menu, for how to choose the file details are given for when using the mouse. (Basically, you right-click on the file when popping up the menu.)

Most of the details shown come from the OS (by using the stat(2) system call), and should always be available unless you have limited permissions for the directory the file is in. The file dimensions (width/height), however, come from the file’s thumbnail. If it doesn’t have one, or if it’s unreadable, or if it has one and it’s readable but it doesn’t mention the original image’s width/height, then the ‘Details from thumbnail’ area is greyed out.

(In explanation of the latter point — pre-5.0 versions of zgv did not generate width/height comments in thumbnails, so zgv users in particular may find the width/height details missing. (xzgv has always been ok, though, it’s just zgv which had this problem.) Worse yet, versions 5.0 and 5.1 generated them with incorrect sizes for most JPEGs. To fix either problem for a given directory, do rm -fr .xvpics in that dir from a shell prompt and recreate the thumbnails with zgv 5.2 or later, or xzgv/xv/Gimp.)

5.10 Tagging

The file selector is not restricted to working on one file at a time. You can ‘tag’ as many (or as few) files as you wish, and certain commands described in this section will act on them.

Initially, all files are untagged, and the filenames usually appear in black (though this depends on the GTK+ theme you’re using). Tagged files appear in red.

5.10.1 Tag and Untag Commands

There are several ways to tag or untag files. The keyboard-based ones which work on individual files (also available on the ‘Tagging’ menu) move the cursor down one row afterwards, to make tagging or untagging multiple files easier.

To tag or untag a single file with the mouse, control-click (i.e. hold down the control key and click) on the relevant filename or thumbnail in the selector. It’s true that you could use ‘Tag’ and/or ‘Untag’ on the ‘Tagging’ menu (see The Selector Menu, for how to choose the file tagged/untagged when doing it this way), but this is usually much less convenient than using control-click. (The menu entries for those are really just for completeness.)

There is also a command available in the viewer to tag the currently-viewed file. See Changing Picture, for details.

=

+

Keypad +

0

Selector menu, Tagging, Tag

Tag file.

-

Keypad -

9

Selector menu, Tagging, Untag

Untag file.

Alt =

Alt-Keypad +

Alt-0

Selector menu, Tagging, Tag All

Tag all files.

Alt -

Alt-Keypad -

Alt-9

Selector menu, Tagging, Untag All

Untag all files.

Alt-o

Selector menu, Tagging, Toggle All

Toggle all tags. This inverts the tagged state, so that all previously tagged files become untagged, and all previously untagged files become tagged.

Currently there is no way to toggle a (single) file’s tag state from the keyboard.

5.10.2 Moving Between Tagged Files

These commands let you search for (move to) the next or previous tagged file (if any). Note that ‘next’ and ‘previous’ here are relative to the keyboard cursor’s position; if you use these from the menu, be careful to right-click on the file you want to start the search from.

/

Selector menu, Tagging, Next Tagged

Move to next tagged file in dir.

?

Selector menu, Tagging, Previous Tagged

Move to previous tagged file in dir.

Equivalent commands are also available in the viewer (see Changing Picture).

5.10.3 Copying/Moving Files

You can copy or move tagged files to a directory you specify. If no files are tagged, xzgv copies/moves the file the cursor is currently on — unless the cursor is on a subdirectory, in which case it gives an error.

C (Shift-c)

Selector menu, File, Copy

Copy tagged files (or the current file) to a given directory. xzgv asks for the destination directory using a dialog (see Dialog Boxes) and copies the files there. If it comes to copy a file but there is an existing file in the dir with the same name, the file is not copied and nor are any of the remaining files.

M (Shift-m)

Selector menu, File, Move

Move tagged files (or the current file) similarly.

5.11 Renaming a File

As well as copying/moving files, you can rename them:

Ctrl-n

Selector menu, File, Rename file

Rename the current file or directory — xzgv will refuse to overwrite any existing files/directories. The new name must remain in the current directory. (See Copying/Moving Files, for how to move a file to a different directory (albeit keeping the same name).) See The Selector Menu, for how to choose the file renamed when using the mouse. (Basically, you right-click on the file when popping up the menu.)

I know Ctrl-n isn’t the most mnemonic keypress possible for ‘rename’, but all the good ones were taken. :-/

5.12 Deleting a File

Deleting a file is pretty straightforward:

Ctrl-d

Selector menu, File, Delete file

Delete the file pointed to by the keyboard cursor (and any accompanying thumbnail). See The Selector Menu, for how to choose the file deleted when using the mouse. (Basically, you right-click on the file when popping up the menu.)

Note that only one file is deleted (hence ‘Delete file’); there is currently no way to delete all tagged files.

5.13 Changing Directory

The easiest way to change the current directory in xzgv is usually to click on a directory entry in the file list (or move the cursor to it and press Enter). Selecting the .. entry moves to the parent directory of the current one.

There is an alternative though:

(Note that the key for this command is shift-g, not g.)

G

Selector menu, Directory, Change

Go to a specified directory. xzgv asks for the destination directory using a dialog box which you should type the dir’s name into (see Dialog Boxes), and moves to that directory if it exists.

5.14 Rescanning the Directory

Normally, xzgv reads a directory once (on starting up, or when a new directory is selected). So if the contents of the directory are changed by another program, this is not automatically reflected. You can, however, explicitly tell xzgv to ‘rescan’ the directory (reread the contents), which will update xzgv’s notion of what’s in it:

Ctrl-r

Selector menu, Directory, Rescan

Rescan the current directory.

5.15 Changing the Sorting Order

Normally, the files are listed in asciibetical order by name. However, you can instead have the file list sorted by size, last-modified date/time, or by ‘extension’ (the file type).

(Only the order of files can be altered; directories are always listed first, and always in name order.)

Alt-n

Selector menu, Directory, Sort by Name

Sort by name. This is the default.

Alt-e

Selector menu, Directory, Sort by Extension

Sort by extension.

Alt-s

Selector menu, Directory, Sort by Size

Sort by size. The biggest files are listed last.

Alt-d

Selector menu, Directory, Sort by Time & Date

Sort by time/date. The newest files are listed last.

You can set the default sort order via the command-line (see Invoking xzgv) or a config file (see Configuring xzgv).

There are three possible timestamps you can use for the ‘Time & Date’ sorting order:

Alt-Shift-m

Selector menu, Directory, Time & Date Type, Modification Time (mtime)

Use the last-modified time (‘mtime’). This is the default.

Alt-Shift-c

Selector menu, Directory, Time & Date Type, Attribute Change Time (ctime)

Use the last-attribute-change time (‘ctime’). Note that this is not always the time the file was created, which it’s sometimes mistaken for; for example, moving a file with mv will usually change the ctime.

Alt-Shift-a

Selector menu, Directory, Time & Date Type, Access Time (atime)

Use the last-accessed time (‘mtime’). The selector order is not automatically updated when xzgv reads files, since this would probably be annoying; do a manual rescan if need be.

5.16 File Selector Options

Various aspects of the file selector’s behaviour can be configured while xzgv is running, by using these toggle commands (which enable the feature if it was previously disabled, and vice versa).

These settings can also be altered using command-line options (see Invoking xzgv) and/or config file settings (see Configuring xzgv).

Alt-a

Selector menu, Options, Auto Hide

Toggle the auto-hiding of the selector when a picture is viewed (off by default). This is handy for small screens/windows, or for old-time zgv users who just dig that groovy modal interface, er, man. :-)

Alt-b

Selector menu, Options, Status Bar

Toggle status bar at the bottom of the selector (off by default). This displays messages in certain circumstances — normally, it just says when a picture is being read.

Selector menu, Options, Thumbnail Msgs

Toggle reading-thumbnails messages (default is off), only visible if the status bar is enabled. These messages make it clear when all thumbnails have been read, but having something flash up every time you change directory is generally just annoying.

v

Selector menu, Options, Thin Rows

Toggle ‘thin rows’ mode (off by default), in which thumbnails are shown at a third their normal size so that many more files can be shown at once. (The odd keyboard shortcut for this is inherited from zgv’s ‘visual’ mode toggle, which had a roughly similar effect.)

Alt-i

Selector menu, Directory, Images Only

Toggle the option to show only directories and image files in the selector (off by default). This is handy in directories where images and other file types are intermingled and you want to avoid the ’Couldn’t load image’ error on those other files. Images are identified by their extensions.

6 The Viewer

Once you’ve selected a file to view, it’s shown in the viewer (the right-hand part of xzgv’s window). This section describes what you can do while viewing the picture.

Like the selector, the viewer has its own menu — right-click anywhere on the viewer (or press F10 or Menu) to show it — and a similar help menu (see The Selector Menu).

6.1 Exiting the Viewer

When using the mouse to control xzgv, it doesn’t matter whether the selector or the viewer has keyboard focus — mouse operations transcend such petty boundaries. :-) But keyboard control is (of necessity) effectively modal, and so you need to ‘exit’ the viewer in order to have keyboard control over the selector again. You also need to exit the viewer if you’ve enabled auto-hide mode.

Exiting the viewer is simple:

Esc

Tab

Viewer menu, Exit to Selector

Exit the viewer. This also returns the selector to its former size, if it was previously ‘hidden’.

Another way of exiting the viewer is to middle-click on it, but this mouse-only approach is really only of use when the selector is ‘hidden’.

6.2 Big Pictures

A picture may well be too large to fit entirely in the viewer window. There are two main things which can help you see more of the picture at once:

• - Make the xzgv window larger. You could ‘maximize’ it with your window manager, or you could start xzgv with a larger window using --geometry or fullscreen mode (see Invoking xzgv). The fullscreen mode gives xzgv the maximum window size possible, but needs co-operation from your window manager (and alas, many are not as willing as one might like) — in some cases you may even find --geometry 100%x100% to be more effective.
• - Hide the selector. To do this, either use auto-hide mode (see File Selector Options), or hide the selector explicitly (see Hiding the Selector).

But of course, these are only partial solutions to the problem; there will inevitably always be pictures larger than your screen can show at once. In general, then, there are two ways to see the whole of the picture.

6.2.1 Scrolling

Scrolling is the default approach to handling big pictures in xzgv. When the viewer is started up, the top-left of the picture is shown — you can either drag the picture around with the mouse (i.e. click and hold the button down, then move the mouse around), or use the scrollbars, or use the cursor keys (and others) to move around the rest of the picture:

Cursor Up

K

Move up 100 pixels. Ctrl-Cursor Up and k both move up 10 pixels.

Cursor Down

J

Move down 100 pixels. Ctrl-Cursor Down and j both move down 10 pixels.

Cursor Left

H

Move left 100 pixels. Ctrl-Cursor Left and h both move left 10 pixels.

Cursor Right

L

Move right 100 pixels. Ctrl-Cursor Right and l both move right 10 pixels.

Page Up

Shift-Cursor Up

Ctrl-u

Move up (nearly) the window height. (It moves by 90% of the height.)

Page Down

Shift-Cursor Down

Ctrl-v

Move down (nearly) the window height.

-

Shift-Cursor Left

Move left (nearly) a window-length. (It moves by 90% of it.)

=

Shift-Cursor Right

Move right (nearly) a window-length.

Home

Ctrl-a

Move to the top-left of the picture.

End

Ctrl-e

Move to the bottom-right of the picture.

6.2.2 Zoom Mode

An alternative way of viewing the whole picture, one which lets you see the picture onscreen all at once no matter how big (or small) it is, is zoom mode.

Zoom mode’s name derives from the idea of ‘zooming’ a small file up to fit the window. But in reality, it is more often used to reduce a large file to fit.

Zoom mode is not the default, and has to be enabled. Once enabled, it stays on until you turn it off again (or until you enable scaling, or select ‘Normal’ (see Scaling)).

z

Viewer menu, Options, Zoom (fit to window)

Toggle zoom mode.

Alt-r

Viewer menu, Options, When Zooming Reduce Only

When in zoom mode, only reduce pictures to fit. This can be useful when going through a lot of unpredictably-sized pictures, as it means that you can see all of a big picture easily without also meaning that tiny little icons assume a scale of Biblical proportions. :-)

Alt-p

Viewer menu, Options, When Zooming Panorama

When in zoom mode, resize to make the most proportional dimension fit and allow scrolling on the other dimension. This can be useful when viewing iamges that do not adjust nicely to the window size but you want to see them as big as possible while using the most space available. The cause for this function was to better read comics, so you can guess it works like a ’fit page width’ option, but is not limited to horizontal adjustment.

The way zoom mode reduces a file to fit the window is (relatively) quick but harsh, and may make the picture look a bit ugly. In future there may be a smoothing option like zgv’s ‘vkludge’, but for now I’m afraid the fairly crude resize is all that’s available.

There is in fact an alternative to zoom mode, as you can scale down an image instead. This is generally only useful for very large images, however; zoom mode tends to be the Right Thing for the most part.

6.3 Scaling

You can scale a picture — this makes it appear larger (or smaller) onscreen. xzgv acts much as if the scaled picture were the real picture; for example, the cursor keys scroll around in steps of 100 scaled pixels, even if this means moving a fraction of a pixel (or many pixels) in the original picture (and similarly for movement with the mouse).

The main limitation of scaling (other than how much it slows things down :-), at least when scaling up) is that you can only scale by integer values, so you can only make each pixel in the image twice as wide/high, or three times as wide/high, or four times, and so on.

(It may seem odd saying e.g. ‘twice as wide/high’ rather than ‘twice the size’, but technically ‘twice the size’ would be referring to scaling up the width (and height) by about 1.414…)

Normally, xzgv does no scaling, which could be considered a ratio of 1:1. Scaling up increases that ratio. How it is increased depends on which option/key you use:

d

Viewer menu, Scaling, Double Scaling

Increase the ratio by doubling it — this leads to ratios of 2:1, 4:1, 8:1…

s

Viewer menu, Scaling, Add 1 to Scaling

Increase the ratio by adding one — leads to ratios of 2:1, 3:1, 4:1…

There are similar commands to decrease the ratio:

D (Shift-d)

Viewer menu, Scaling, Halve Scaling

Decrease the ratio by halving it.

S (Shift-s)

Viewer menu, Scaling, Sub 1 from Scaling

Decrease the ratio by subtracting one.

Usually the double/halve scalings are more useful.

Note that you can also double/halve the scaling by using shift-left-click on the viewer to double, and shift-right-click to halve. This still changes scale ‘around’ the middle of the window though (rather than around the point clicked on, as you might expect), which is a little strange and may possibly be changed in future.

When you scale ‘below’ 1:1, the above commands lead to ratios of (e.g.) 1:2, 1:4, 1:8, etc. — that is, the ratios work the same way, but the other way around. This gives you an increasingly small image.

The scaling ratio is never decreased below 1:32. It is also never increased beyond the point where the overall image size would exceed 32767x32767 — this limit is due to the combination of X’s limit on window sizes, and the implementation used by xzgv for scaling.

One problem with scaling up, given the way it’s currently implemented, is that it’s not well-suited to dithered display — so if you’re running on an 8-bit server, dragging the image around slowly when using scaling (especially scaling with interpolation) may result in some nasty, streaky, undithered-looking parts of the picture. :-(

You can undo the effect of scaling (up or down) at any time:

n

Viewer menu, Scaling, Normal

Resume ‘normal’ display — disables scaling mode, and also zoom mode.

Normally, scaling up works by simply making the pixels into larger and larger squares (in effect), which remain the same colour. However, you can enable a feature called ‘interpolation’ which smoothly graduates the colour change between the top-left corners of each pixel. This is very slow, but looks nice.

i

Viewer menu, Options, Interpolate when Scaling

Toggle interpolation in scaling mode.

(If you like the appearance of scaling with interpolation, you may also be interested in a program I wrote called pnminterp, which can scale up a PGM or PPM file while applying this effect. These days it’s part of the netpbm package.)

Scaling down, however, is implemented a bit like a special-case zoom mode, and currently there are no ways of making that look nicer. :-/

xzgv normally ‘reverts’ scaling (returning the scale to 1:1) back to normal when you view a new picture. However, it’s possible to disable this behaviour (see Viewer Options).

There is also support for an alternative form of scaling — decoupled, or axis-specific, scaling. When you scale in this way, only one axis of the image is scaled at once. For example, you might choose to effectively double the height of an image (with the width left unchanged). Indeed, this sort of scaling is useful for temporarily correcting pictures intended for display using pixels twice as wide or high as normal.

x

Viewer menu, Scaling, X Only, Double Scaling

Increase the (x axis) ratio by doubling it.

X (Shift-x)

Viewer menu, Scaling, X Only, Halve Scaling

Decrease the (x axis) ratio by halving it.

Alt-x

Viewer menu, Scaling, X Only, Add 1 to Scaling

Increase the (x axis) ratio by adding one.

Alt-Shift-x

Viewer menu, Scaling, X Only, Sub 1 from Scaling

Decrease the (x axis) ratio by subtracting one.

y

Viewer menu, Scaling, Y Only, Double Scaling

Increase the (y axis) ratio by doubling it.

Y (Shift-y)

Viewer menu, Scaling, Y Only, Halve Scaling

Decrease the (y axis) ratio by halving it.

Alt-y

Viewer menu, Scaling, Y Only, Add 1 to Scaling

Increase the (y axis) ratio by adding one.

Alt-Shift-y

Viewer menu, Scaling, Y Only, Sub 1 from Scaling

Decrease the (y axis) ratio by subtracting one.

There are also mouse shortcuts for scaling up/down a single axis; control-left-click scales up, and control-right-click scales down. By default this acts on the y axis, but the active axis can be toggled with Alt-c, or by toggling the Ctl+Click Scales X Axis option (see Viewer Options).

Interpolation is not currently supported in situations where the x scaling does not match the y scaling.

6.4 Mirror and Rotate

Sometimes when viewing a picture you will want to flip it horizontally or vertically, or rotate it:

m

Viewer menu, Orientation, Mirror (horiz)

‘Mirror’ the picture (flip it horizontally).

f

Viewer menu, Orientation, Flip (vert)

‘Flip’ the picture (flip it vertically).

r

Viewer menu, Orientation, Rotate Right

Rotate the picture 90 degrees clockwise.

R (Shift-r)

Viewer menu, Orientation, Rotate Left

Rotate the picture 90 degrees anti-clockwise. (Any US readers surprised and/or annoyed by my not saying ‘counter-clockwise’ will realise why the menus say rotate right/left. :-))

N (Shift-n)

Viewer menu, Orientation, Normal

Restore the picture orientation to normal. This undoes the effect of any mirrors, flips, and/or rotations.

xzgv normally ‘reverts’ the picture orientation (the way the picture has been transformed by mirror/flip/rotate) back to normal when you view a new picture. However, it’s possible to disable this (see Viewer Options), so that any new pictures are mirrored, flipped, and/or rotated in the same way.

6.5 Changing Picture

It’s possible to go directly to the previous or next file (or tagged file) in the directory, or to tag a file, without having to pick the file from the file selector by hand. These commands are particularly useful when using xzgv from the keyboard, but there’s also a notable mouse shortcut for moving to the next image.

Space

Viewer menu, Next Image

Move to next file in dir, and view it. You can also click on the picture/viewer to do this. (If you find this interferes with dragging the picture around (though it shouldn’t), or just don’t like it, it can be disabled (see Config Variables).)

b

Viewer menu, Previous Image

Move to previous file in dir, and view it.

Ctrl-Space

Viewer menu, Tagging, Tag then Next

Tag current file, then move to next file in dir and view it.

/

Viewer menu, Tagging, Next Tagged

Move to next tagged file in dir, and view it.

?

Viewer menu, Tagging, Previous Tagged

Move to previous tagged file in dir, and view it.

6.6 Hiding the Selector

When running on small screens, or in a small window, it can get a bit annoying to lose viewer space by having the selector constantly displayed when you don’t actually need it. The usual solution to this problem is to enable auto-hide mode. But what if some pictures you’re viewing are small and some large? It can sometimes be nearly as annoying having the selector hidden to ‘make room for’ a small picture which didn’t need it. So for that reason, or perhaps if you just don’t like auto-hide mode :-), you may prefer to leave auto-hide off and explicitly hide the selector when necessary:

Z (shift-z)

Viewer menu, Window, Hide Selector

Hide the selector. (This is actually a toggle, of sorts; ‘hide selector’ when it’s already hidden unhides it.)

You can also hide or unhide the selector by middle-clicking on the viewer.

6.7 Minimizing xzgv

Generally it’s easy enough to use your window manager to change windows etc., but when running fullscreen this can sometimes be a little problematic. For this reason, xzgv has built-in support for ‘iconifying’ itself:

Ctrl-z

Viewer menu, Window, Minimize

Minimize the xzgv window.

6.8 Viewer Options

As with the selector, various options can be disabled/enabled which relate to the viewer.

These settings can also be altered using command-line options (see Invoking xzgv) and/or config file settings (see Configuring xzgv).

z

Viewer menu, Options, Zoom (fit to window)

Toggle zoom mode, discussed in more detail elsewhere (see Zoom Mode).

Alt-r

Viewer menu, Options, When Zooming Reduce Only

Toggle reduce-only in zoom mode, also covered elsewhere (see Zoom Mode).

Alt-p

Viewer menu, Options, When Zooming Panorama

Toggle panorama view in zoom mode, also covered elsewhere (see Zoom Mode).

i

Viewer menu, Options, Interpolate when Scaling

Toggle interpolation when a picture is being scaled-up. Again, this has already been mentioned (see Scaling).

Alt-c

Viewer menu, Options, Ctl+Click Scales X Axis

Toggle the axis scaled when you control-click (or control-right-click) on the image. The default is to scale the y axis.

F (shift-f)

Viewer menu, Options, Dither in 15 & 16-bit

Toggle dithering in 15/16-bit modes. This increases the apparent colour depth making gradations look much better, but it’s slower than undithered rendering, and can (in 16-bit) slightly distort a picture’s colour balance. (The F key was chosen for this as the dither toggle is functionally similar to zgv’s ‘fakecols’ toggle.)

Viewer menu, Options, Revert Scaling For New Pic

Normally xzgv returns the scaling back down to 1 (normal) when a new picture is selected. By disabling this, you can retain scaling across picture selection. (There is currently no keyboard shortcut for this fairly-seldom-changed option — to toggle it from the keyboard, you should use the popup menu (press F10), and select the menu item.)

Viewer menu, Options, Revert Orient. For New Pic

Similarly, xzgv returns to the picture’s true orientation (not mirrored, rotated, etc.) on selecting a new picture. Disabling this option means that any mirrors/flips/rotates applied persist across multiple images. (No keyboard shortcut — see above.)

Viewer menu, Options, Use Exif Orientation

Toggle support for Exif orientation. Devices which create JPEG files in the Exif format (e.g. many digital cameras) may add an orientation tag to the file, which says how the camera was being held when the picture was taken. When this tag is present, xzgv can adjust the image to compensate for a camera being held on its side. (This isn’t done by default as it misrepresents the true image, which could be confusing if you don’t know why it’s happening.) Enabling this option may be useful if you take pictures with your camera on its side, but don’t want to have to rotate the pictures before being able to view them properly. Of course, for this to work your camera has to be inserting the orientation tag in the first place — but it can’t hurt to try it and see. (No keyboard shortcut — see above.)

7 File Formats

Picture files are stored in a variety of different forms, or ‘file formats’. xzgv, via gdk, supports many.

7.1 File Type Identification

The format a file is in is identified by its content. The file-reading code relies on libgdk to determine the file type and read the file correctly; generally this uses the format’s ‘magic number’ to determine file type — e.g. a JPEG/JFIF file starts with the (hex) bytes FF D8. So if you start xzgv with ‘xzgv foo’, and foo is in a supported format (such as JPEG), the format will be figured out and the file loaded even though the ‘extension’ is absent.

8 Configuring xzgv

Many aspects of the way xzgv works can be modified by using a configuration file.

8.1 Config Files

A configuration file lets you alter aspects of xzgv’s behaviour. xzgv supports two possible config files — a system-wide one, /etc/xzgv.conf; and one for each user in their home directory, $HOME/.xzgvrc. Both are optional. If $HOME/.xzgvrc exists, it is used instead of /etc/xzgv.conf.

Before describing the format of config files, it may help to give an example file:

# Sample xzgv config file
# Comment lines begin with `#' and are ignored,
#  as are blank lines.

# make pics fit window
zoom on
# hog the screen :-)
fullscreen on

It is a line-based format. Each line (or rather, each line which is not a comment line and is not blank) assigns a value to a single predefined ‘variable’. xzgv has many such variables it lets you modify in this way. For example, the ‘fullscreen’ option above controls whether or not xzgv tries to use the whole screen for its window. If it is given the value on/y/yes/1 it does; if off/n/no/0, it doesn’t. Most variables are of this yes-or-no ‘boolean’ type.

Since the variables set in a config file have a direct effect on how xzgv works, it can be easier to simply call them ‘settings’. Indeed, such terminology is used on occasion in this documentation.

8.2 Config Variable Types

There are various types of variable:

• - Boolean. These are on-or-off, yes-or-no variables. Most of xzgv’s config file variables are of this type.
• - Integer. These are whole numbers. The meaning of the number depends on what the variable is used for.
• - Geometry. This window size-and/or-position specification format is only used for the geometry setting. See Invoking xzgv, for a description of how this type works.

8.3 Config Variables

Currently, most configuration variables (settings) in xzgv can also be set by command-line options; indeed, the name of the setting in all such cases is identical to that for the long version of the option (e.g. fullscreen, auto-hide). As such, they’re documented in the section which discusses command-line options and the like (see Invoking xzgv).

However, there are some settings only available in the config file:

‘click-for-next’

This is enabled by default, allowing you to click on the viewer to skip to the next image. If disabled, clicking on the viewer does nothing.

9 Rationale

Here I (RJM) attempt to explain why I did things the way I did. This is presented in a question-and-answer format of sorts.

9.1 Why Yet Another Viewer?

Previously, this section concentrated on xv; that may have made sense when I originally wrote it, and still makes a certain limited amount of sense for zgv, but for xzgv it was looking increasingly dated. And so here I am writing an update. :-)

I originally wrote xzgv as I simply wasn’t happy with the viewers for X that I was aware of at the time (mid-1999). At the time of writing (late 2000), other key things about xzgv are becoming apparent, partly through responses I’ve been getting to it:

• It’s ‘fast’. No, it doesn’t do any particular operation faster than other viewers as far as I know (well, maybe thumbnail updates :-)); rather, the interface tries not to get in your way. Click on a filename, and the picture appears. No multiplicity of toolbars or windows, it’s just there.
• As with zgv, it tries to do one thing well, viewing pictures. It isn’t perfect in this regard, I’ll admit, but at least it stays well clear of picture editing.
• It’s, er, quite a lot like zgv. Some of us old fogies like this. :-)

I won’t pretend xzgv is The Ultimate Viewer For Everyone. Some people will prefer other approaches, or just simply prefer other viewers. (Some people may even still use xv, ghod forbid.) There are a few viewers which you may like to try if you don’t think much of xzgv:

• gqview. This seems to be well-regarded. I find it a bit gimmicky and kitchen-sink-ish; not quite as ‘pure’ or focused as xzgv, IMHO. I think more people use it than xzgv though.
• xli. I’m not sure if this is maintained these days, but it’s not too bad a viewer. No thumbnails or file selector though. (These days I mostly use this for setting the root window pixmap, something I don’t think belongs in a viewer, but which xli does happen to be quite good at.)
• qiv. If I read between the lines correctly, this is essentially a modern replacement for xli.
• gtksee. I’ve not tried this, but I think the idea is that it’s an ACDSee clone, and there seem to be an awful lot of people who want a clone of that. Which is their problem. :^)
• Electric Eyes. To be honest, I think this has been outclassed by other viewers these days, which shows how far we’ve come.

Ah, you say, what of xv? Well, we’ve emphatically reached the point where no-one need use xv any more. Anyone using xv these days really should drop that pile of ill-conceived non-Free crap and use one of the better viewers now available. It’s that simple.

9.2 Why no image-editing capabilities?

It’s a fscking viewer, dammit. If you want xv you know where to find it.

(OTOH, if you want a decent image editor, use the Gimp.)

9.3 Why a Texinfo Manual?

For years, I maintained a conventional ‘man page’ for zgv (which xzgv was loosely based on). But over time, I realised just how impossibly confusing the zgv man page had become.

So I wanted to rewrite zgv’s documentation in a more sensible way, in some other format than a man page. I wanted an established, well-supported format with structure and cross-referencing. I felt this made it a choice between HTML and texinfo. HTML seemed to me to be a moving target like no other, and not as well supported on text-only terminals as Info (and thus texinfo). (This latter point is admittedly not too relevant as far as xzgv is concerned.) When I noticed that a converter existed to convert texinfo to HTML in any case, the case was closed. xzgv’s documentation was then based on zgv’s — the documentation is probably more similar than the programs are. :-)

Don’t get me wrong — I like man pages. And even with the excellent Texinfo documentation and Emacs’ very helpful Texinfo mode, writing texinfo is hardly easy. (Without Texinfo mode’s node- and menu-update commands, I personally would find it near-impossible!) But big man pages just aren’t that good for reference, and this is made worse by the relative lack of structure.

9.4 Why One-space Sentence Ends?

The conventional way to write texinfo is to follow each sentence with two spaces after the dot (or whatever ends the sentence). Many people normally write this way in a non-texinfo context too. But a sizeable proportion of people normally write text with only one space after the dot — and I’m one of them.

The Texinfo documentation gives the impression that two-space must be used; it says “it is important to put two spaces at the end of sentences in Texinfo documents.” But the only circumstance in which spacing from the texinfo file is preserved at all (in any sense other than ‘there is a space here’) is when the texinfo is converted to Info format. So, in fact, the decision to use two-space depends on how the author wants Info output to appear — this is a subjective decision which should be entirely down to the preference of the author, despite the Texinfo documentation’s attempt to make two-space sound like an objective you-must-do-this kind of thing.

You might wonder what the problem with using one-space is, then. Well, ‘makeinfo’ has to reformat paragraphs, and whenever it needs to insert space at (what appears to it to be) the end of a sentence, it inserts two spaces. This behaviour cannot be altered, unlike in Emacs (‘sentence-end-double-space’; see Fill Commands in The Emacs Editor) and GNU fmt (‘-u’; see fmt invocation in GNU Text Utilities). Also, attempting to ‘fix’ the output Info with sed doesn’t work properly because the ‘tags’ used to find nodes quickly are then incorrect. These could of course also be fixed, but this would involve a lot more work than a simple sed invocation.

So realistically, anyone who writes texinfo with one-space has to put up with the occasional two-space sentence end being inserted into their text — worse still, the current ‘makeinfo’ formatting algorithm seems to insert two spaces even after abbreviations (such as ‘e.g.’ and ‘etc.’), which breaks even two-space texinfo. (This is particularly ironic, by the way, since two-space partisans’ main argument in favour of the practice is often the way it makes it possible to tell the difference between abbreviations and the end of a sentence.)

One last point may be worth noting; I am not the first person to write texinfo files using one-space. At the time of writing, it is used in the texinfo documentation for BFD, gdbm, GTK/GDK, (Linux) IPC, and viper, and I expect there are instances I’m not aware of.

10 Bugs and Restrictions

All (non-trivial) programs have bugs. Anyone who denies this…

• - clearly hasn’t written too many programs.
• - is wrong. ;-)

It follows that xzgv, like everything else, always has some bugs. Usually these are not too serious, or I’d have fixed them before releasing xzgv. But either way, bugs and other problems with xzgv are noted here.

10.1 Known Bugs

• - In zoom mode, it copes with resizing the window as a whole, but doesn’t when you change the size of the pane (apart from when hiding/showing selector or resizing from keyboard, but that’s only ’cos I kludged it :-)).
• - When scaling up and dithering, you end up with a crappy-looking picture if you drag the picture around slowly (since each exposed bit is dithered independently, with no regard given to matching up to any previous error-diffusion).
• - Scaling up is slow. Not sure if I can do much about this.
• - Using an alignment widget to centre the viewer window results in some annoying ‘bounce’ in certain resizing situations etc.
• - Thumbnails don’t look so great in palette-based (e.g. 8-bit) modes.
• - When dragging an image around, if you quickly move the mouse pointer over from the image area to the selector area, the image seems to ‘jump’ a little. I think this may have something to do with the paned window’s window-splitting bit, but I’m not sure. Also, it jumps when moving across scrollbar sliders and the paned window splitter handle.
• - It doesn’t apply any tranparency mask. The practical result of this seems to be purple transparent bits in thumbnails and scaled-up images, and black transparent bits elsewhere. This doesn’t affect PNG files, though.
• - If a GIF file is corrupted in such a way that the decompressed image has a larger number of pixels in it, the extra pixels will be ignored and no error or warning will be generated.
• - If you look up ‘joe code’ in a dictionary, right next to “see zgv” it now says “but for really in-depth insight into the joe code nature, see xzgv”. :-)

10.2 Suboptimal Features

• - Thumbnails are given an accurate width/height ‘IMGINFO’ comment, but are always claimed to be "RGB".
• - xzgv doesn’t duplicate zgv’s behaviour of generating thumbnails under ~/.xvpics/_foo_bar_baz if it can’t generate them in /foo/bar/baz/.xvpics. I doubt anything else supported it, and it complicated lots of things unnecessarily. This isn’t particularly suboptimal, but as an incompatibility with zgv it merits mention.

10.3 Restrictions

• - Only the first image of a multiple-image GIF is used. (These days, multiple-image GIFs are usually animations.)

10.4 Reporting Bugs

If you find xzgv does something wrong, which you suspect might be a fault of some sort (a bug) in the program, it is best to report it as I may not be aware of the problem. (But first, check it is not a ‘known bug’. See Known Bugs. It is not usually helpful to report a bug I already know about.)

It is important to include as much detail in a bug report as you can. Here are some details you should include:

• The version of xzgv you are running. xzgv --version reports this.
• The versions of GTK+ you are using. xzgv --version-gtk reports the GTK+ version being used by xzgv.
• The bitdepth your X server is running in (common depths are 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit). If you don’t know what depth you’re running in, try xdpyinfo|grep depth.
• A description of the bug — what effects it has, the circumstances it occurs in, and so on. Does it only happen for certain types of file? Only when in 8-bit modes? Only when dithering is enabled? Even ‘irrelevant’ details can sometimes be useful.
• Finally, if you are a programmer and believe you have managed to fix the bug yourself, patches are gratefully accepted. :-) You should generate the patch using diff -c or (preferably) diff -u.

Then, please file a bug report in the SourceForge bug tracker. See ‘https://sourceforge.net/p/xzgv’.

10.5 Reporting Documentation Bugs

Bugs in the documentation can sometimes cause as much trouble as bugs in the program; if you notice a problem in the documentation, it’s a good idea to report it.

For reports of documentation bugs, you should include these details:

• The version of xzgv the documentation is for.
• If it is a problem in one specific section of the documentation, specify which part it is (by this I mean the heading it comes under; texinfophiles should read this as ‘the node name’ :-)).
• The format of the documentation you saw the problem in (e.g. info, man page, HTML).
• A description of the problem.

See Reporting Bugs, for details of where to send the bug report.

11 Future Changes

If you want to suggest a feature you’d like in xzgv, or a change to an existing feature, contact me; see See Reporting Bugs for the address.

Future changes etc. are listed in the TODO file.

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