Scanning directories and loading animated images too slow

Description First of all, great work. I’m really interested on it. Now, everything goes fine when you open a single file or several files using a glob expression (e.g. ~/Downloads/*.png). However, whenever you want to browse a directory, it takes too long (like 20 secs or more) to load the TUI viewer (while recursively scanning image files in the given directory). Once the TUI finally loads, it is also a bit slow whenever you hover a directory (a few seconds depending on the directory).

To Reproduce term-img DIR or term-img DIR/*

Expected behavior term-img should be quicker and smoother when recursively browsing directories

Desktop:

• OS: Arch
• Kernel version: Linux 5.15.12 (libre-hardened)

Package info:

• Python version: 3.10.2
• Package version: 0.1.1
• Installation method: clone repo and then pip install

Terminal Emulator:

• Name: Tested on Xterm (370) and Alacritty (0.10.0)

[leo-arch]

I’ll update you on the protocol support issue as I progress

Thanks! That would be great.

[leo-arch]

Hey @AnonymouX47! Sorry for the delay.

It’s much better now! Congrats and thanks! I really like this. I guess PIL internally uses something along the lines of cacalib or chafa (i.e., ASCII/ANSI rendering). Do you plan to add support for ueberzug, w3img, sixel or kitty? These protocols are really good at displaying images on the terminal, and besides they are more and more widely adopted.

I myself implemented a files previewer (not only images, but also PDF, document, postscript files, and even sound files) using fzf and ueberzug for my CliFM, but only as a plugin (a shell script indeed): it’s nice and all, but far from ideal. A third party utility able to do this smoothly, and able to be integrated into CliFM, would be really nice. And term-img is on the right track for sure.

Keep up the good work!