On my CentOS system, I usually use eog to view images in the console. But I am a little upset by its speed of opening an image. I do not need such functionality besides viewing an image. So I decided to find another lightweight replacement.

After searching the internet, I found a post on stackexchange. According to the answers in the post, I decided to install feh on my CentOS 7 system. The install process turns out to be a little bumpy.

Feh is not in the official yum repo. So we have to build it from source. Unfortunately, the offical page only gives instructions on how to install it on Debian-based systems. What is worse, some of the package names are different on CentOS. After some trial and error, I succeeded in installing it on my system. Here is how.

First, we need to install some dependencies:

yum -y install libcurl-devel libX11-devel libXt-devel libXinerama-devel libpng-devel

Then we need to manually download other packages and install them:

wget ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/repositories/home:/Kenzy:/modified:/C7/CentOS_7/x86_64/imlib2-1.4.6-2.1.x86_64.rpm
wget ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/repositories/home:/Kenzy:/modified:/C7/CentOS_7/x86_64/imlib2-devel-1.4.6-2.1.x86_64.rpm
wget https://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/project/libjpeg-turbo/1.5.1/libjpeg-turbo-official-1.5.1.x86_64.rpm
yum --nogpgcheck localinstall imlib2-1.4.6-2.1.x86_64.rpm imlib2-devel-1.4.6-2.1.x86_64.rpm libjpeg-turbo-official-1.5.1.x86_64.rpm

After that, get the latest feh release from official github repo, compile and install (make sure that you have root privilege, or you have to install it on other directories which you have write access):

git clone git://github.com/derf/feh.git
cd feh
make -j${nproc} && make install

I have put all the command into a bash script, you can find it here. Simply run the script to install feh.

If nothing went wrong, you should be able to use feh right away.

Usage#

Limit the window size to a specific size#

We can use -g or --geometry option:

-g, –geometry WxH[+X+Y] Limit the window size to DIMENSION[+OFFSET]

For example, to show image with maximum window size of 400x500, use the following command:

feh --geometry 400x500 /home/images/

Keep the image viewing window to screen size#

We can use -. or --scale-down to scale the image to fit the screen size:

feh --scale-down /home/images/

Display the image info without showing the image#

We can use -l or --list to show image info (it width, height, etc.) without showing the image.

References#

• feh command cheatsheet: https://github.com/derf/feh/blob/master/src/help.raw
• feh man page: https://manpages.debian.org/testing/feh/feh.1.en.html