Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal

Being able to launch Electro via CLI would be awesome! Never really done something like that - might have a look at implementing it (unless you want to contribute :^)

The project is in its infancy at the moment. Features like keyboard controls to zoom etc. are all on the table - I love when users give me all these ideas for where to take the project

Loved Irfanview, switched to ImageGlass for aesthetics (hated the performance), switched back to Irfanview, hated how ancient it felt.

Electro aims to do what an image viewer should do best - show images. There aren't any UI elements when an image is first loaded - hence the hidden terminal (pack a lot of functionality without worrying about visual clutter).

I have been carefully thinking about the direction I want to take with UI elements. The goal was to build the fastest & most efficient image viewer. Will I achieve this through clickable UI elements? Through keybinds only? Through terminal? Only time and testing will tell.

The project is fresh out of the oven and ready to be moulded into whatever the community wants it to be. The two mantras Electro will always stand by are Performance & Efficiency.

Thanks for the thread - loved reading everyone's thoughts.

P.S JPEGView was by far my favourite but again, too ancient. I want something truly fresh and that was the goal of this project

Try JPEGView - it is much faster than Irfanview for looking through a folder of images. Either preloads or has a better rendering engine, or both.

Make sure to get the currently supported fork, not the original.

Same. Will be interested to try the new tool but it would take a lot to unseat Irfanview for me.

Another vote for Irfanview from me! Is there an app like this for MacOS?

Thanks for the constructive feedback - the folder feature is 100% coming soon, it was one of my favourite features from other viewers as well.

I'll create an issue for the resizing, good spot!

Feedback is always greatly appreciated :))

Would absolutely love to get linux & macOS included. I don't own a mac so naturally that will need to be community contributed / wait until I cough up the money. Linux is 100% on the agenda.

Thanks for bringing Oculante to my attention - it looks awesome! That level of functionality is what I'm striving for (w/o as much UI clutter though).

I feel the TS & CSS pain. Electro v1.0 was C# WPF and very very very fast but the UI was just rubbish and I knew C# WPF would hold me back in the future. Electro v2.0 was then written in C++ but I didn't get far with it because I REALLY didn't like writing C++. Electro v3.0 was then written with Electron + TS + CSS but electron is shit. Finally, I landed where we are today - it struck the perfect balance of performant, modern language, fun to write, allowing for rapid iteration.

Will Electro stay with the TS+CSS+Tauri stack forever? Probably not! As the community grows I hope bring in contributors who are more well versed in the world of low-level image viewers to help guide Electro to be EVEN FASTER & closer to the system level (Like Electro v2.0 aimed to be w/ c++).

For the time being I've decided to just ship with what I have and iterations will come later. I do dream of the day we go frameworkless (to an extent ofc) and render everything from the GPU at nanosecond speeds while also maintaining the sleek feeling Electro currently has!

Hey! Appreciate the concern w/ web requests. If you look closely at the URL you'll notice that all the requests are to *.localhost addresses. This is just how Tauri's asset handling & IPC systems work - nothing to worry about :)

I've gone ahead and create a GitHub Issue about setting up a checkbox with the installer such that it doesn't force Electro as the default app. It's something I wanted to add pre-announcement but figured it wouldn't be as much of a requested feature as it clearly is, my bad.

Thanks for the feedback!