Thomas Capricelli

Well… you know how it is, you get used to a tool, and even if some brand new software is now available, you keep on using this old stuff. In his case, i’m speaking of xv, whose last release was in 1994. It’s still my default viewer for all image formats in my KDE/firefox/whatever settings.

So it’s old, it’s unmaintained, but there’s something even worse : it’s not Free Software. That’s probably the reason nobody took off maintainance, by the way.

Because of all those reasons, most distributions do not ship it anymore, and that’s a shame (my distribution of choice, Gentoo, does though, congrats!)

This project is about providing a key-to-key compatible image viewer, GPL, and maintained. Using a toolkit sush as Qt, it’s not very difficult. The two main features are “Free Software” and “maintained”. I use it everyday, trust me it will be maintained 🙂

I’ll also probably provide binaries for MacOS and Windows, because we basically have this for free thanks to Qt portability.

qxv is a single binary, and does not depend on any other files (despite, of course, dynamically linked libraries, whatever they are).

The 0.1 release provide those features (all present in xv)

• create list of images from comand line
• those keys are handled the same way as xv : space(next image), backspace(previous image), enter(reload current image), “,”(shrink), “.”(grow), “<“(shrink a lot), “>”(grow a lot), “t”(rotate clockwise), “T”(rotate counterclockwise), q(quit), h(horizontal flip), v(vertical flip)
• basic control window (available by a right click on the main window)

More information:

• Project homepage
• Download
• Mercurial repository