add display for multiple images horizontally

[acxz]

Having the ability to display multiple images in a horizontal fashion.

Right now calling multiple images with chafa defaults to a vertical layout, but it would be nice to also have a horizontal layout.

For reference, timg achieves this with the --grid flag. https://github.com/hzeller/timg/blob/cfd5f7a99401074ccfad31fa6234e94e5175074f/README.md?plain=1#L82

P.S. as a workaround currently I am using imagemagick to manually stitch the images together and then using chafa. I imagine if this step is done inside of chafa, the overall pipeline will be faster.

[hpjansson]

Absolutely. It's not even that hard to add, so I could see it making the 1.14 release.

For reference, I imagine you're using something like this...

montage -tile 6x -background none -geometry 64x64+1+1 *.png - | chafa -s 80

...which is indeed very slow, and also consumes lots of memory if it's a big collection. With proper support in chafa, you could also show file names etc.

[hpjansson]

This reminds me I also want something like a --fit-width switch or some other way to respect one terminal dimension while ignoring the other (as you would with tall images that're supposed to scroll vertically).

[acxz]

For images I am using +append:

https://github.com/acxz/pokeshell/blob/52b3ec29dfb9cb9e0c3a0ed4198d9c019536e84a/bin/pokeshell#L446-L447

However, for gifs I have to do something a bit more creative:
https://github.com/acxz/pokeshell/blob/52b3ec29dfb9cb9e0c3a0ed4198d9c019536e84a/bin/pokeshell#L524-L529

For gifs it is a bit more involved as I down/upsample the frames in multiple gifs to have the same number of frames in all the gifs. I essentially create a new gif stitched images that are sampled from the individual gifs.

The more this functionality can be incorporated into chafa the faster I believe my script will be.

[clort81]

to fit width i just alias or script -s $(tput cols)

[wabiloo]

Any feedback on how I could do this?
And ideally I'm after a method that would work with the various pixel types...

[hpjansson]

Hi - I didn't have time to add this in 1.14, but I'll see if we can't get something going for 1.16. --fit-width is in now, though. Thanks for the interest.