Install tpix with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• tpix

Project history

The project was created in 2022 by Jesper Vedberg as a personal answer to a remote-computing workflow problem. The README explains that the author, working as a bioinformatician on remote servers and clusters without root access, wanted an easy way to inspect plots over SSH after moving from iTerm2 on macOS to Kitty on Linux.

The implementation choice reflects that origin: tpix was written in Nim so it could be compiled and cross-compiled into small, statically linked binaries that could be copied to systems where the user could not install packages globally. GitHub release metadata shows four 1.0.x releases between May and June 2022.

Adoption history

tpix remains a niche package-manager tool. Its upstream README documents release binaries for Linux and macOS, source installation through Nimble, and testing with Kitty, WezTerm, and Konsole. Homebrew packages it as `tpix`, making the single-purpose terminal image viewer available through the normal Unix package workflow.

How it is used

Typical use is direct and Unix-like: run `tpix image.jpg` or pipe image data through standard input. The tool resizes images to terminal width by default and exposes flags for dimensions, background handling, filename printing, and resize behavior.

Why package nerds care

For package collectors, tpix is notable less as a large application than as a tidy example of the post-Kitty terminal graphics ecosystem: a tiny compiled CLI, packaged for Homebrew, that solves the remote-server 'quickly inspect an image' workflow without a GUI or root privileges.

Timeline

• 2022-04: GitHub repository created.
• 2022-05: v1.0.0 released.
• 2022-06: v1.0.3 released.

Related projects

• Kitty, WezTerm, Konsole, Nim, Pixie, Cligen, iTerm2 terminal image workflows.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/jesvedberg/tpix
• https://github.com/jesvedberg/tpix#readme
• https://github.com/jesvedberg/tpix/releases
• source_facts.package-manager