sView is a macOS-native, keyboard-first image viewer in the spirit of qView: no chrome, instant open, vim keys. It is written in Swift with an AppKit canvas and SwiftUI overlays, uses only Apple frameworks (ImageIO, Core Animation) and has no third-party dependencies. It is built for two jobs: quick-looking any photo from Finder or the terminal, and walking a tree of screenshot folders case by case without touching the mouse.
- Opens from Finder,
open -a sView, drag and drop, thesviewcommand (ls *.png | sview -reads paths from stdin) and File > Open Recent; a folder opens at its first image. - Fast: decodes at window size on background threads, preloads neighbours, keeps a bounded cache, and hands Core Animation display-ready images; about 210 ms from launch to the first image and 16 ms to the next on an M-series Mac (bench/RESULTS.md).
- Everything ImageIO decodes: JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL, TIFF, GIF and more, with EXIF orientation; animated GIF, APNG and WebP play, pause and step frame by frame; files it cannot decode show an in-window message and Quick Look is one key away.
- Fit, width, height, actual and free zoom anchored at the cursor, pan by keys, drag or trackpad, rotate and flip for viewing, auto, colour or checkerboard backgrounds, fullscreen and a borderless theatre mode.
- Vim grammar: counts (
5n,20G), multi-key bindings (gg,yy,dd),.to repeat,/to filter, marks, and a:line with tab completion for commands, options, hooks and paths. - Folders:
]and[jump between sibling folders, a sidebar of folders with image counts, a recursive mode that flattens a tree, a thumbnail strip, and a folder watch that shows new screenshots as they land. - Files: copy path, name or image, reveal, open with, rename in place, move to trash with undo, export the marked names, compare two marked images side by side with zoom and pan in step.
- Plain-text settings and keymap in
~/.config/sview/, reloaded the moment they change; every command is in the menu bar with its key. - PoC evidence helpers: case id and step in the title, the case memo beside the captures with the current entry highlighted, and
:runhooks that call your scripts with the current file, folder and marked files.
sSuite is a small family of macOS tools that turn work done on screen into step-by-step evidence and guides, one job per tool, published under the uSuite organization. The organization page explains why the family exists.
| Tool | Job |
|---|---|
| sCapture | captures a window at a fixed size and scale into the active case folder (shell proof of concept today, Swift app next) |
| sView (this one) | views images and walks case folders from the keyboard |
| sNotate | annotates a case folder as one story and exports one image per step |
| sWalk | planned: renders a notated case as an animated step-by-step clip |
| scommon | the Swift package the tools share: folders, sorting, config and keymap |
sView is the reading link: it opens what sCapture writes, steps from one case folder to the next with ] and [, and shows the case memo beside the captures. It never changes a capture, and it works on its own as an everyday image viewer for any folder of photos.
Press ? in a window for the live list. The most used ones:
| Keys | Action |
|---|---|
n p, space |
next and previous image |
gg G, 20G |
first, last, image 20 |
h j k l |
pan when zoomed, else navigate |
+ - = e |
zoom in, out, fit, actual size |
< > |
rotate left and right |
] [ backspace |
next, previous and parent folder |
t s i I |
thumbnails, sidebar, info, memo |
m ' C |
mark, next marked, compare marked |
yy yi R dd u |
copy path, copy image, reveal, trash, undo |
/ : ? |
filter, command line, help |
The full list is docs/keys.md, generated from the built-in keymap.
~/.config/sview/config holds one key value per line and documents itself; :set <key> <value> edits it in place. ~/.config/sview/keymap adds or replaces bindings, one <keys> <command> per line, and <keys> nop removes a default; :map appends to it. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is honoured. sView > Settings… (cmd-,) shows every option as a control and writes the same lines, and imports or exports the config and keymap as a zip.
preload 2
cache_mb 512
sort name
background checker
click_navigates true
hook evidence python3 ../report.py --dry-run
Requires macOS 26 or newer, on Apple silicon or Intel. Download sView-<version>.zip from the latest release, open it, and move sView.app to Applications. For the sview command, link the launcher inside the app: mkdir -p ~/.local/bin && ln -sf /Applications/sView.app/Contents/Resources/sview ~/.local/bin/sview.
The release is signed ad hoc, not with a paid Apple Developer ID, so Apple has not notarised it. The first time you open a downloaded copy, macOS stops it with "Apple could not verify sView is free of malware" (the dialog quotes the app name). Choose Done, then allow it once, either way:
- System Settings > Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security, and next to the line saying sView was blocked to protect your Mac, choose Open Anyway, confirm with your password or Touch ID, then Open. The button shows for about an hour after the blocked attempt.
- Or in Terminal, remove the download flag macOS checks:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/sView.app
From then on that copy opens like any app; each new version you download asks once more. Control-click > Open no longer skips the check on recent macOS. Only downloaded copies are checked: a copy you build yourself never carries the download flag, so it opens at once. If you would rather not run a binary you did not build, build it from source as below.
With Xcode 26 or newer and XcodeGen (brew install xcodegen):
make appmake installSwiftPM fetches scommon from GitHub on the first build, or uses a ../scommon checkout beside this one when there is one. make app writes build/sView.app; make install links the sview command into ~/.local/bin. make release builds a universal app and zip, and make notarize signs and notarises it when a Developer ID is available.
sView reads the images you open and the folders they are in. It has no network code: nothing is collected, sent or uploaded, and it asks for no permissions.
~/.config/sview/(or$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sview/), created on first launch:configandkeymap, plain text you can edit, andstate.json, the last session, safe to delete.- In the folders you open, only when you ask: rename, move to the Trash (with undo), and
:export-marked <file>, which writes the marked names to that file. - Export Config in Settings writes a zip of
configandkeymapwhere you choose in a Save panel;:export-configwrites it to the path you give, or to the Desktop when you give none, and macOS may ask once for the Desktop. :runhooks are shell commands you write inconfig; they run with your permissions in the current folder. sView runs nothing else.
This release is not sandboxed yet, which is why macOS does not ask before sView writes ~/.config/sview/. The next minor version moves sView into the App Sandbox: it will ask once for each folder you open, and its own files will live in its container, with your current ones moved there on first launch.
make test runs the core library tests, make smoke drives the app through every default key binding and takes snapshots, make hostile throws broken and huge files at it, make idle checks idle CPU and leaks, and make bench appends a line to bench/RESULTS.md. The architecture is in docs/02-tech-stack.md, the backlog in docs/01-backlog.md and decisions in docs/DECISIONS.md. Branches follow git-flow and versions follow semver; the version lives in VERSION.
MIT, see LICENSE.