a fine command-line utility by jtr · review - 11 January 2005, 21:07

I have written before about handy command line utilities. Recently I found another: fbi.

fbi (should an uncapitalized proper noun that begins a sentence be capitalized? It does not feel correct and yet it also feels incorrect not to do so) is an image viewer for the Linux framebuffer. This means one can view images without X (or XFree86 if you are using Debian). The caveat, however, is a working framebuffer is required. (If you do not use a framebuffer for the console, you should. It is beautiful (note: this screenshot is of an actual console, not an xterm of any sort) and provides a much higher resolution.

Here is a screenshot (using the very excellent fbdump):

Remember, this is from a console; X is not running.

Here is a second screenshot showing the help menu (and the few “editing” options available):

This is a fantastic tool. It also includes a framebuffer-console PDF viewer, though it seems to only support black/white images as it first converts the .pdf to .tiff and then displays the image via fbi.

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  1. I’ve read lots of documentation on the framebuffer, but it’s all technical jargon that means nothing to me. I still don’t know what it is, aside from the mere fact it gives me a beautiful console under SUSE 9.2, since I don’t like X logins. I keep seeing mention of replacing X with it, but little explanation for mere users.
    — Ed Hurst    Jan 12, 12:01 PM    #
  2. Perhaps the most significant reason (from an end-user perspective) to use a framebuffer is gui-like readability at a higher resolution. With a framebuffer, I can see far more text on the screen without it being choppy and having shoddy quality and being difficult to read. If you follow the link under the word “beautiful” in my post, you will see how nice fonts/typefaces are with it. The screenshot is of a framebuffer at 1024×768x24.
    — jtr    Jan 14, 02:25 PM    #
  3. Well, SUSE agressively defaults to the frame buffer, displaying a nice color band above and below the text area. The resolution is something like 1280×1024x16 (roughly 140×80 characters). They’ve done this sort of thing since 7.x. Since there are so very few good office apps in the console, I stay with the GUI. My personal wish is for a genuine office suite, a browser as good as Arachne for DOS, and a mail client (with sane keystrokes, unlike mutt) that handles and displays multiple accounts in simulation of the way GUI clients work. The old ‘mc’ is pretty good if ask me (just need mouse support in the console for it). I really don’t like X very much because it’s just too much. That doesn’t mean I’m ready to live on a mere black-n-white console. I wish I had the influence or money to impell serious development of the framebuffer for such use.
    — Ed Hurst    Jan 15, 12:15 PM    #