techMonday, January 24, 2005
I was a fan of the ACDSee image viewer back when I was an MS Slave. ACDSee was pretty awesome compared to some of the alternative image viewers - MS's picture and fax viewer just sucks in comparison. ACDSee can do full screen, auto resizing, slideshow, folder thumbnail view with preview pane, it included a simple, but useful editor. And it was pretty fast.
I spent quite some time looking for a nice image viewer for linux with similar features to ACDSee. I don't care about the editing feature because I have other tools for that, but I at least wanted something that could do a slideshow of a directory and allow you to scroll forward and backward through all the images in a directory.
My mistake was that I was looking for a GUI based package with an ACDSee look and feel. There are a few, but they are a bit lacking in features and interface.
I had looked at qiv a bit, but dismissed it because it doesn't have any GUI to speak of. It's made to be used from the command line and displays the images in a simple window (or fullscreen).
When I did decide to give it a try, I knew that I'd found my new favorite image viewer. Yes, it's started from the command line and has a million option switches, but I wrote two bash aliases in my .bashrc file - one to interactively view a set of images fullscreen, and another to start a fullscreen slideshow. I prefer to use an xterm rather than a GUI file manager, so it's natural for me to start the command from within an xterm - I usually have a few open just for such purposes.
Don't fear the Command Line Interface (CLI). If you learn to comfortably use a CLI, you will find that you can actually do things faster than you can with a GUI. You need to learn to type of course, but when you get used to a CLI, the mouse seems slow and barbaric by comparison. I do like GUI's - they're pretty and they let you view graphical web pages, videos, images, have multiple windows open at a time, etc. But it is certainly counterproductive to rely entirely (or nearly so) on the GUI. In Windows, you can't do much of anything without the GUI and it's very limiting.
Unix CLI tools are designed for scripting... You don't have to type a million commands with a million options every time you want to do something. If it's something that you might do often, then you can write a script to do it. Then you start the script with a much simpler command and it does all the work for you. Or if it's as simple as setting a few options, you can create an alias with those options, making the command much simpler.
CLI commands can be started from a GUI as well - you can make a launcher on your Desktop or Window Manager's menu or set your file manager to launch the command for certain file types, etc.
Now I think that qiv is actually better than ACDSee. It doesn't have any GUI overhead, it can be controlled interactively from the keyboard to do just about anything that ACDSee could do (but it doesn't have a thumbnail view). And it can be started with specific options from the command line and incorporated into scripts. And it's fast.
Learn to use the CLI and keyboard shortcuts - they're much faster than stumbling around with the mouse. When you become comfortable with these, you will realize that you don't need the GUI for everything anymore.
In order to become comfortable with the CLI, you have to use Linux or another Unix. If you try to use the Windows XP command line (cmd), you will not experience the power of CLI - it's just not there. Windows is designed to be a strictly GUI environment and the CLI isn't good for much other than System Administration - and not much good for that either. Unix was designed from the beginning for efficient CLI usage and it's only improved with time.
There's been a lot of drive to create Windows-like GUI software and "look and feel" for linux so that non-Unix people will accept it. Instead, people should learn to use the CLI and to understand more of what's going on when they're using a computer (A lot of people don't know the difference between system memory and hard drive storage). Commercial GUI software tends to assume that the user is stupid and doesn't have a clue - well, if that's the only kind of software a person is exposed to, then that person will, effectively, be stupid and not have a clue about computers.
Ah, enough ranting. Commercial software sucks. Go with Open Source.
I spent quite some time looking for a nice image viewer for linux with similar features to ACDSee. I don't care about the editing feature because I have other tools for that, but I at least wanted something that could do a slideshow of a directory and allow you to scroll forward and backward through all the images in a directory.
My mistake was that I was looking for a GUI based package with an ACDSee look and feel. There are a few, but they are a bit lacking in features and interface.
I had looked at qiv a bit, but dismissed it because it doesn't have any GUI to speak of. It's made to be used from the command line and displays the images in a simple window (or fullscreen).
When I did decide to give it a try, I knew that I'd found my new favorite image viewer. Yes, it's started from the command line and has a million option switches, but I wrote two bash aliases in my .bashrc file - one to interactively view a set of images fullscreen, and another to start a fullscreen slideshow. I prefer to use an xterm rather than a GUI file manager, so it's natural for me to start the command from within an xterm - I usually have a few open just for such purposes.
Don't fear the Command Line Interface (CLI). If you learn to comfortably use a CLI, you will find that you can actually do things faster than you can with a GUI. You need to learn to type of course, but when you get used to a CLI, the mouse seems slow and barbaric by comparison. I do like GUI's - they're pretty and they let you view graphical web pages, videos, images, have multiple windows open at a time, etc. But it is certainly counterproductive to rely entirely (or nearly so) on the GUI. In Windows, you can't do much of anything without the GUI and it's very limiting.
Unix CLI tools are designed for scripting... You don't have to type a million commands with a million options every time you want to do something. If it's something that you might do often, then you can write a script to do it. Then you start the script with a much simpler command and it does all the work for you. Or if it's as simple as setting a few options, you can create an alias with those options, making the command much simpler.
CLI commands can be started from a GUI as well - you can make a launcher on your Desktop or Window Manager's menu or set your file manager to launch the command for certain file types, etc.
Now I think that qiv is actually better than ACDSee. It doesn't have any GUI overhead, it can be controlled interactively from the keyboard to do just about anything that ACDSee could do (but it doesn't have a thumbnail view). And it can be started with specific options from the command line and incorporated into scripts. And it's fast.
Learn to use the CLI and keyboard shortcuts - they're much faster than stumbling around with the mouse. When you become comfortable with these, you will realize that you don't need the GUI for everything anymore.
In order to become comfortable with the CLI, you have to use Linux or another Unix. If you try to use the Windows XP command line (cmd), you will not experience the power of CLI - it's just not there. Windows is designed to be a strictly GUI environment and the CLI isn't good for much other than System Administration - and not much good for that either. Unix was designed from the beginning for efficient CLI usage and it's only improved with time.
There's been a lot of drive to create Windows-like GUI software and "look and feel" for linux so that non-Unix people will accept it. Instead, people should learn to use the CLI and to understand more of what's going on when they're using a computer (A lot of people don't know the difference between system memory and hard drive storage). Commercial GUI software tends to assume that the user is stupid and doesn't have a clue - well, if that's the only kind of software a person is exposed to, then that person will, effectively, be stupid and not have a clue about computers.
Ah, enough ranting. Commercial software sucks. Go with Open Source.
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Good afternoon Blogger, I find it very refreshing to occasionally find a post or topic such as yours with a unusual theme completely. My wife liked it too.
I must admit I tend to have a soft spot for sites related to article publishing and /or sites that have a central theme around article publishing type items. Probably the webmaster in me.
Once again, thank you Blogger, and I hope you don't mind if I visit again sometime.
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I must admit I tend to have a soft spot for sites related to article publishing and /or sites that have a central theme around article publishing type items. Probably the webmaster in me.
Once again, thank you Blogger, and I hope you don't mind if I visit again sometime.
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