This plugin attempts to add image support to Neovim.
It works wonderfully with Kitty + Tmux, and it handles painful things like rendering an image at a given position in a buffer, scrolling, windows, etc.
It has built-in Markdown and Neorg integrations that you can use right now.
It can also render image files as images when opened.
Join on Discord: https://discord.gg/tQVKuZCZ
image-2.mp4
These are things you have to setup on your own:
- ImageMagick - mandatory
- magick LuaRock - mandatory (
luarocks --local install magickor through your package manager) - Kitty >= 28.0 - for the
kittybackend - ueberzugpp - for the
ueberzugbackend - curl - for remote images
After installing the magick LuaRock, you need to change your config to load it.
-- Example for configuring Neovim to load user-installed installed Lua rocks:
package.path = package.path .. ";" .. vim.fn.expand("$HOME") .. "/.luarocks/share/lua/5.1/?/init.lua;"
package.path = package.path .. ";" .. vim.fn.expand("$HOME") .. "/.luarocks/share/lua/5.1/?.lua;"NixOS users need to install imageMagick and luajitPackages.magick (thanks to @donovanglover).
If you don't want to deal with setting up LuaRocks, you can build your Neovim with the rock installed:
With home-manager (thanks @wuliuqii 3rd#13)
{ pkgs, ... }:
{
nixpkgs.overlays = [
(import (builtins.fetchTarball {
url =
"https://github.com/nix-community/neovim-nightly-overlay/archive/master.tar.gz";
}))
];
programs.neovim = {
enable = true;
package = pkgs.neovim-nightly;
extraLuaPackages = ps: [ ps.magick ];
};
}Without home-manager
# https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/editors/neovim/utils.nix#L27
{ pkgs, neovimUtils, wrapNeovimUnstable, ... }:
let
config = pkgs.neovimUtils.makeNeovimConfig {
extraLuaPackages = p: [ p.luarocks p.magick ];
withNodeJs = false;
withRuby = false;
withPython3 = false;
# https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/211998
customRC = "luafile ~/.config/nvim/init.lua";
};
in {
nixpkgs.overlays = [
(_: super: {
neovim-custom = pkgs.wrapNeovimUnstable
(super.neovim-unwrapped.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
version = "master";
buildInputs = oldAttrs.buildInputs ++ [ super.tree-sitter ];
})) config;
})
];
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ neovim-custom ];
}-- default config
require("image").setup({
backend = "kitty",
integrations = {
markdown = {
enabled = true,
clear_in_insert_mode = false,
download_remote_images = true,
only_render_image_at_cursor = false,
filetypes = { "markdown", "vimwiki" }, -- markdown extensions (ie. quarto) can go here
},
neorg = {
enabled = true,
clear_in_insert_mode = false,
download_remote_images = true,
only_render_image_at_cursor = false,
filetypes = { "norg" },
},
},
max_width = nil,
max_height = nil,
max_width_window_percentage = nil,
max_height_window_percentage = 50,
window_overlap_clear_enabled = false, -- toggles images when windows are overlapped
window_overlap_clear_ft_ignore = { "cmp_menu", "cmp_docs", "" },
editor_only_render_when_focused = false, -- auto show/hide images when the editor gains/looses focus
tmux_show_only_in_active_window = false, -- auto show/hide images in the correct Tmux window (needs visual-activity off)
hijack_file_patterns = { "*.png", "*.jpg", "*.jpeg", "*.gif", "*.webp" }, -- render image files as images when opened
})- You must set:
set -gq allow-passthrough on - If you want the images to be automatically hidden/shown when you switch windows (
tmux_show_only_in_active_window = true), set:set -g visual-activity off
Download minimal-setup.lua from the root of this repository and run the demo with:
nvim --clean -c ":luafile minimal-setup.lua"All the backends support rendering inside Tmux.
kitty- best in class, works great and is very snappyueberzug- backed by ueberzugpp, supports any terminal, but has lower performance- Supports multiple images thanks to @jstkdng.
markdown- uses tree-sitter-markdown and supports any Markdown-based grammars (Quarto, VimWiki Markdown)neorg- uses tree-sitter-norg (also check nvim-neorg/neorg#971)
Check types.lua for a better overview of how everything is modeled.
local api = require("image")
-- from a file (absolute path)
local image = api.from_file("/path/to/image.png", {
id = "my_image_id", -- optional, defaults to a random string
window = 1000, -- optional, binds image to a window and its bounds
buffer = 1000, -- optional, binds image to a buffer (paired with window binding)
with_virtual_padding = true, -- optional, pads vertically with extmarks
...geometry, -- optional, { x, y, width, height }
})
-- from a URL
local image = api.from_file("https://gist.ro/s/remote.png", {
id = "my_image_id", -- optional, defaults to a random string
window = 1000, -- optional, binds image to a window and its bounds
buffer = 1000, -- optional, binds image to a buffer (paired with window binding)
with_virtual_padding = true, -- optional, pads vertically with extmarks
...geometry, -- optional, { x, y, width, height }
})
image:render() -- render image
image:render(geometry) -- update image geometry and render it
image:clear()
image:move(x, y) -- move image
image:brightness(value) -- change brightness
image:saturation(value) -- change saturation
image:hue(value) -- change hue- @benlubas for their countless amazing contributions
- @edluffy for hologram.nvim - of which I borrowed a lot of code
- @vhyrro for their great ideas and hologram.nvim fork changes
- @kovidgoyal for Kitty - the program I spend most of my time in
- @jstkdng for ueberzugpp - the revived version of ueberzug
Some years ago, I took a trip to Emacs land for a few months to learn Elisp and also research what Org-mode is, how it works, and look for features of interest for my workflow. I already had my own document syntax, albeit a very simple one, hacked together with Vimscript and a lot of Regex, and I was looking for ideas to improve it and build features on top of it.
I kept working on my syntax over the years, rewrote it many times, and today it's a proper Tree-sitter grammar, that I use for all my needs, from second braining to managing my tasks and time. It's helped me control my ADHD and be productive long before I was diagnosed, and it's still helping me be so much better than I'd be without it today.
One thing Emacs and Org-mode had that I liked was the ability to embed images in the document. Of course, we don't "need" it, but... I really wanted to have images in my documents.
About 3 years ago, I made my first attempt at solving this problem but didn't get far. If you have similar interests, you might have seen the vimage.nvim demo video on YouTube.
It was using ueberzug, which is now dead. It was buggy and didn't handle things like window-relative positioning, attaching images to windows and buffers, folds, etc.
Kitty's graphics protocol was a thing, but it didn't work with Tmux, which I'll probably use forever or replace it with something of my own.
Now, things have changed, and I'm happy to announce that rendering images using Kitty's graphics protocol from Neovim inside Tmux is working, and it's working pretty well!
My plan for this plugin is to support multiple backends, provide a few core integrations, and an easy-to-use API for other plugin authors to build on top of. There is a lot of logic that deals with positioning, cropping, bounds, folds, extmarks, etc. that is painful and unrealistic to write from scratch for every plugin that wants to use images.