On Fri, Feb 20, 2026 at 10:29:16AM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
>
> with GTK2 scheduled for removal in the next Debian release and the bug
> #967842 being release-critical, it seems we need to think about the
> future of xzgv in Debian.
Thanks for reaching out. Because of GTK2 going away, this is
something that I've been considering.
I wasn't aware of nsxiv and geeqie as possible alternatives for xzgv,
so I appreciate your raising them as alternatives.
Based on how I use xzgv personally, I find nsxiv to be a closer match
for me, although it doesn't have the file browsing feature which
geeqie does have --- although I do find how they implement them to be
quite annoying.
Quoting from the xzgv man page:
If started with `xzgv files', xzgv hides the file selector and
treats the file or files as if they were the sole contents of a
directory. (It also automatically loads the first file.) As such,
you can use the Next Image and Previous Image commands to navigate
between the images, or do Exit to Selector and use the selector
directly.
So something like "xzgv ~/www/*.jpg" works much like "nsziv
~/www/*.jpg". The command-line options and keyboard accelerators are
different, of course, but that's going to be pretty inevitable when
switching between image viewing programs.
Since nsxiv doesn't have a file selector, if what you are doing is
"xzgv ~/images/" that's where "geeqie ~/images" is a much closer
match, and I'm guessing that's why you were suggeseting geeqie as a
potential alternative for xzgv.
The use case where geeqie has an... interesting UI choice is when you
run "geeqiee ~/www/*.jpg". The file selection page on the sidebar
lists *all* of the files in ~/www, with the *.jpg files highlighed,
making it hard if you want to switch between the various image files
since there would be a huge amount of *.html files in the selection
window getting in the way. Interestingly, if you hide the file
selection sidebar using C-h (or the equivalent menu bar option), and
the unhide the file selector, the *.jpg files are no longer
highlighted, and when you try to step through the image files, geeqie
will attempt to display the HTML files.
And if you do something like "geeqie ~/www/*.jpg ~/Images/*.jpg" it
does something even stranger, which I haven't completely figured out,
but it's not actually something I find helpful (or even intuitive,
since I'm not even sure what it's trying to achieve).
So from the perspective of my own personal use, I would probably never
use geeqie, but pick nsxiv instead. However, there may be some xzgv
users who would find "geeqee ~/Images" to be what they want.
Hmm... perhaps eog ("eye of gnome") might be a better suggested
replacement for xzgv? Its image gallery is not quite a replacement of
the file selector, as it shows thumbnails instead of filenames, but
it's close.
- Ted
