The FEH Command Line Image Viewer

The feh lightweight image viewer offers a quick-and-easy way to display images and even to perform a few light edits. It also develops text and thumbnail listings and displays slideshows.

Invoking 'feh'

To run feh, invoke it from a shell prompt specifying a particular image:

feh teal-cat.jpeg

The command—which occupies the shell in the foreground—displays the image in a simple frame. When you close feh, the shell prompt returns.

Using the 'feh' Graphical Interface

While an image displays, right-click on it to reveal a flyout menu. From it, you're free to perform very basic edits like setting the image as the desktop background, rotating it, resizing it and saving it with a different filename.

Options are limited, however. This utility is optimized for fast viewing, not for detailed graphics editing.

Using 'feh' from the Shell

When you invoke feh, use the following flags and options to extend the utility's performance:

• -Z: Zoom pictures to the screensize in full-screen mode
• -x: Use a borderless window
• -d: Overlay the filename at the top-left edge of the image
• --edit: Allows for rotating/mirroring the image using the <, >, | and _ keys.
• -F: Displays the window in fullscreen mode
• -g widthxheight: Uses a fixed-size window—e.g., -g 640x480 fixes the size as 640-pixels-by-480-pixels.
• -i: Enables index mode to create an index of thumbnails with the image name beneath the thumbnail
• -l: Instead of displaying an image, it analyzes them and prints a directory listing with additional metadata.
• -m: Montage mode, which creates a new image consisting of a grid of thumbnails of the images in the fileset.
• -z: Randomize files in a slideshow
• -r: Recursively expand all directories in the command-line argument to include those directories, all the way to the bottom-most level
• -S type: Sort images according to parameters; valid types include name, filename, dirname, mtime, width, height, pixels, size, format