Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal (opens in new tab)

Being able to launch Electro via CLI would be awesome! Never really done something like that - might have a look at implementing it (unless you want to contribute :^)

The project is in its infancy at the moment. Features like keyboard controls to zoom etc. are all on the table - I love when users give me all these ideas for where to take the project

Thanks for the constructive feedback - the folder feature is 100% coming soon, it was one of my favourite features from other viewers as well.

I'll create an issue for the resizing, good spot!

Feedback is always greatly appreciated :))

Loved Irfanview, switched to ImageGlass for aesthetics (hated the performance), switched back to Irfanview, hated how ancient it felt.

Electro aims to do what an image viewer should do best - show images. There aren't any UI elements when an image is first loaded - hence the hidden terminal (pack a lot of functionality without worrying about visual clutter).

I have been carefully thinking about the direction I want to take with UI elements. The goal was to build the fastest & most efficient image viewer. Will I achieve this through clickable UI elements? Through keybinds only? Through terminal? Only time and testing will tell.

The project is fresh out of the oven and ready to be moulded into whatever the community wants it to be. The two mantras Electro will always stand by are Performance & Efficiency.

Thanks for the thread - loved reading everyone's thoughts.

P.S JPEGView was by far my favourite but again, too ancient. I want something truly fresh and that was the goal of this project

Try JPEGView - it is much faster than Irfanview for looking through a folder of images. Either preloads or has a better rendering engine, or both.

Make sure to get the currently supported fork, not the original.

Same. Will be interested to try the new tool but it would take a lot to unseat Irfanview for me.

check out kpic from Ken Silverman: https://www.advsys.net/ken/utils.htm

Another vote for Irfanview from me! Is there an app like this for MacOS?

I generally love the Win7 era stuff better than anything that's come since, but I always struggled with the image viewer. Pressing the keyboard hotkey for "next"/"prev" (right/left?) it always seemed to randomly lose focus (without me tabbing to another button or anything) after a few times, and I'd have to grab my mouse again and cursor-click the button.

Would absolutely love to get linux & macOS included. I don't own a mac so naturally that will need to be community contributed / wait until I cough up the money. Linux is 100% on the agenda.

Thanks for bringing Oculante to my attention - it looks awesome! That level of functionality is what I'm striving for (w/o as much UI clutter though).

I feel the TS & CSS pain. Electro v1.0 was C# WPF and very very very fast but the UI was just rubbish and I knew C# WPF would hold me back in the future. Electro v2.0 was then written in C++ but I didn't get far with it because I REALLY didn't like writing C++. Electro v3.0 was then written with Electron + TS + CSS but electron is shit. Finally, I landed where we are today - it struck the perfect balance of performant, modern language, fun to write, allowing for rapid iteration.

Will Electro stay with the TS+CSS+Tauri stack forever? Probably not! As the community grows I hope bring in contributors who are more well versed in the world of low-level image viewers to help guide Electro to be EVEN FASTER & closer to the system level (Like Electro v2.0 aimed to be w/ c++).

For the time being I've decided to just ship with what I have and iterations will come later. I do dream of the day we go frameworkless (to an extent ofc) and render everything from the GPU at nanosecond speeds while also maintaining the sleek feeling Electro currently has!

So this is a hotly debated subject and I 100% understand why and even agree with many people on this. I do firmly believe that Electro is indeed "hyperfast" even with WebView2 and that's down to the fact that there is absolutely zero bloat shipped with the tool & every addition is carefully considered for its potential performance impact before it's added.

I had a meeting today with 6 other software engineers who are interested in the project & have experience in computer graphics (a topic I will admit is not my strongest) and we all unanimously agreed to gradually shift Electro away from WebView2 and towards a custom-built 2D renderer for truly native "hyperfast" performance :)

As mentioned in another reply on this thread, I'm not here to fool anyone - this is version ~4.0 of Electro and the first version I feel is feature rich enough to ship publicly. The other 3 versions of experimentation (over the last year and a half) included Rust, C++ & OpenGL, Electron, and Tauri all of which had significant pitfalls.

The final decision was to "just ship it" and see how the community reacts. I've seen (as I anticipated) a huge number of people suggesting we move away from Tauri and that's exactly what we will do.

Open sourcing this project was keeping me up at night because deep inside I knew that it would need another version. That being said, I'm so glad I did it or else there would not be any pressure to actually do it and it probably would have ended up just like all my other dozens of projects that are just sat in private repos collecting dust. At least now with this version people can A) Enjoy using a new tool w/ unique features (built-in terminal, performance focus) and B) Even contribute if they feel like doing so.

I'm very excited to see where this goes but the compass is very clearly pointing towards ultra low-level rendering techniques and I honestly can't wait to set sail!!

Not yet but 100% a feature we can get shipped (seems to be pretty high demand)

Naturally images of this magnitude will take slightly longer to load on any hardware & image viewer. It's not instant but it's also significantly faster than the other image viewers I have tried on my system.

I downloaded NASA's photos of the moon and tested those with wonderful results. I was actually using these enormous 16k+ images during my testing specifically because they are the ultimate benchmark for image viewer performance!

I haven't been able to do direct comparisons but they most likely have very similar performance. The major bottleneck with Electro at the moment (which will certainly be addressed on Electro (internal) v5.0 aka Electro Next) is the reliance on Tauri & WebView2.

As soon as I can port over core functionality to a custom desktop renderer things will go from being 10x faster (currently) to 1000x faster (the end goal).

I'm currently trying to balance Electro with: university final year, job applications, 2 other OSS projects I contribute to, and a friends' business website so these features will most likely take many months to get through. I'm hoping the eyes Electro has gained from this announcement will bring in some talent who know more about lower level image viewer functionality than I do so that they can help guide the project towards the ultimate performance-first tech stack!

Hey! Appreciate the concern w/ web requests. If you look closely at the URL you'll notice that all the requests are to *.localhost addresses. This is just how Tauri's asset handling & IPC systems work - nothing to worry about :)

I've gone ahead and create a GitHub Issue about setting up a checkbox with the installer such that it doesn't force Electro as the default app. It's something I wanted to add pre-announcement but figured it wouldn't be as much of a requested feature as it clearly is, my bad.

Thanks for the feedback!