nnn + tmux + preview-tui = blur

[danielb2]

hi, just using nnn + preview-tui I have no problems previewing images, but as soon as I do this in a tmux window, resulting images are blurry. What's causing this? Can I fix it?

• Terminal: Kitty

so it should be using icat to view

example using inside tmux example not using tmux

[luukvbaal]

preview-tui does not currently facilitate this use-case (kitty itself can multiplex so why use tmux?).
However if icat works inside of a tmux session I guess we could support this by setting NNN_PREVIEWIMGPROG to "icat".
Please let us know if it works and open a PR if you can.

[danielb2]

it already has this line

    if [ "$NNN_TERMINAL" = "kitty" ] && [ -z "$NNN_PREVIEWIMGPROG" ]; then
        kitty +kitten icat --silent --scale-up --place "$1"x"$2"@0x0 --transfer-mode=stream --stdin=no "$3" &

[danielb2]

@luukvbaal any ideas?

[luukvbaal]

Yes like I said you could test whether forcing the use of the icat kitten while in a tmux session will work. Something like:

if [ -n "$KITTY_LISTEN_ON" ] && { [ -z "$NNN_PREVIEWIMGPROG" ] || [ "$NNN_PREVIEWIMGPROG" = "icat" ] ;}; then
    kitty +kitten icat --silent --scale-up --place "$1"x"$2"@0x0 --transfer-mode=stream --stdin=no "$3" &
...

Kitty users could set NNN_PREVIEWIMGPROG to icat which would then be used even inside a tmux session. I don't know whether it works though...

If it doesn't, I don't think there is a resolution. preview-tui correctly detects the tmux session and uses catimg/viu/chafa to display an (indeed pixelated) image.

[danielb2]

looks like there's a few different things going on. kitty doesn't play well with viu + tmux. ( https://github.com/atanunq/viu mentions half blocks ). this isn't just viu, but catimg etc all have the same problem with kitty

then icat itself seems to have problems, but only if the tmux session is detched using -d. however, removing the -d focuses the wrong window and has another set of problems.

Since Kovid is very responsive, I'm guessing the approach is to alert him of the icat issue and fix that which I will.

Can be reproduced by just doing:

tmux split-window -d -h 'kitty +kitten icat foo.jpg; sleep 1'

which doesn't work

while

tmux split-window -h 'kitty +kitten icat foo.jpg; sleep 1' does work

[danielb2]

kovidgoyal/kitty#6573

[danielb2]

I suspected this, but not possible.

[danielb2]

I suppose one way is to use kitty window instead of tmux window? it seems to work fine in screen but I can't seem to get it to work in tmux

[danielb2]

btw @luukvbaal have you looked into timg? works really well with your previwer and movie files too