Awesome

Explosion

Command line image viewer which supports 24-bit (16 million) colors, much based upon the post by maato. The implementation in that post is however only with 256 colors while a bunch of terminal emulators has support for True Colors, so I had an attempt at reimplementing the same but with more colors.

That's also where the name comes from, as this is more of an explosion of colors, compared to maato's implementation.

Usage

$ explosion --help
Usage: explosion [options] [file | - ...]

  Specify "-" or just nothing to read from stdin.

Options:
  -h uint
        Maximum height of output in number of lines (default 110)
  -w uint
        Maximum width of output in number of columns (default 204)

Screenshots

Taken in iTerm 2.9 on OS X:

Installation

If you have Go installed, then you should simply run:

go get github.com/Tenzer/explosion

and you will get the explosion executable inside $GOPATH/bin.

Change log

1.1.2 - 2021-05-23

• Switch dependencies to use go modules
• Update all dependencies

1.1.1 - 2018-10-22

• Read from standard input when no input file is provided.
• Vendored dependencies.

1.1.0 - 2015-10-21

• Fix bug where the outputted RGB values was on a scale from 0-65535 instead of 0-255 which doesn't work everywhere.
• Attempt to decrease output amount if the two colors within the same character is identical.
• Add support for reading from standard input when specifying "-" as the filename.
• Add command line options -h and -w to overrule the size of the printed image.
• Automatically determine image default output size based upon terminal size.

1.0.1 - 2015-10-19

• Use "lower half block" instead of "upper half block" for the sub-character resolution. This removes the artifacts from the upper half block not covering the top row of pixels with iTerm on OS X.

1.0.0 - 2015-10-19

• Initial release

To do

• Attempt to implement maato's solution with the higher image resolution, by making use of the extra characters available.
• Possibly add support for 256 color output, for terminals which only support that (with a flag).
• Find out if goroutines makes sense performance wise, ie. per image or per set of rows in the image?