xv is a
shareware
Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...
program written by John Bradley to display and modify digital images under the
X Window System
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...
.
While popular in the early 1990s ("XV is widely considered to be the preeminent image viewer for the X Window System"
), no official releases have been made since December 1994. Bradley was unable to negotiate the
LZW patent licence necessary for encoding the then-popular
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...
format. The patent has now expired, so this legal constraint is no longer relevant.
Until at least 2000, Bradley collected third-party updates to xv, for example, support for the
PNG image format.
These were published as source code
patches only.
Additional patches are still () created and maintained by volunteers.
xv can be run from either the command line or through a graphical interface.
It distinguishes itself from many other bitmap viewing and editing programs with a very efficient interface in which the user edits just the parameters of a fixed pipeline of processing steps, rather than modifying the bitmap directly in each operation. As a result, the user can easily undo operations (such as cropping, color modifications, filtering) out of order, rather than only being able to undo the respective last operation. While this concept limits what xv can do compared to some alternatives, the functionality it provides can be applied very conveniently and efficiently.
See also
*
Comparison of image viewers
This article presents a comparison of image viewers and image organizers which can be used for image viewing.
Functionality overview and licensing
Supported file formats
Commonly used vendor-independent formats
Camera raw formats
Support ...
Notes
External links
* http://www.trilon.com/xv/ Official Website
* http://sonic.net/~roelofs/greg_xv.html Greg's Jumbo Patches for John Bradley's XV
* Devex Opus, http://groupbcl.ca/blog/posts/2019/building-xv-on-ubuntu/ Installing XV on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (in 2019)
* https://github.com/jasper-software/xv A GitHub repository for the XV software with improvements and patches incorporated from numerous sources (e.g., Greg's Jumbo Patch Set, patches from the Fedora Linux RPM on RPM Fusion, support for CMake-based builds, GitHub Actions CI builds for Linux and MacOS, changes for JasPer 3.x JPEG-2000 support)
Image viewers
Shareware
X Window programs
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