Image previews

Mitos can preview PNG, JPEG, GIF, and WebP files directly in the terminal. Previews are read-only and fit the available pane. A caption shows the image format, dimensions in pixels, and file size.

Open an image

Open an image from your shell:

ms screenshot.png

Inside Mitos, use :open screenshot.png, the file picker (Space f), or the file explorer (Space e). The picker can also show an image in its preview pane before you open it.

Terminal rendering

Mitos detects the terminal’s image capabilities automatically. When detection fails, it falls back to rendering with half-block characters. The appearance and resolution therefore depend on your terminal.

Images resize to fit when the pane size changes. GIF and WebP previews show a still image; animation playback is not supported.

Preview limitations

Image previews do not provide image editing. Unsupported formats, files that cannot be decoded, or images that exceed the decoder’s limits show a binary-file placeholder instead.

The decoder limits image width and height to 32,768 pixels and its allocation budget to 128 MiB. A compressed file can be small on disk but still exceed the decoding budget. If a preview is unavailable, check the format and try a smaller copy of the image.