Lightning Image Viewer – overlay, map-like controls, toggling, image-rs
Hi HN! I'd like to share my app for viewing images the way I find comfortable on a desktop computer. No window frame, no menus, no toolbars, just the image itself in transparent fullscreen overlay; pan (move around) with mouse with left button pressed (or keyboard arrows), zoom into point under cursor with scroll (or into point at center of display with keyboard +=/-/0), close with left click anywhere (or keyboard Enter, allowing "instant toggle" between file manager and image view). Written in C and Rust with SDL3 and image-rs. Source and builds for Linux (Ubuntu 25.10, Nix expr)…
Lightning Image Viewer – overlay, map-like controls, toggling, image-rs launched on January 5, 2026 with 5 votes, #3,400 of 14,584 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
Fast&lightweight desktop image (pre)viewer displaying image in transparent overlay, allowing border-free pan&zoom into hovered detail and toggling back to file manager in a single move - shatsky/lightning-image-viewer
Implemented in C and Rust with SDL3 and image-rs. It does not currently do any magic to display images "lightning fast", but it's significantly faster than "common" desktop image viewers; just because it's small bloat-free native (as in "native code") app. Image loading speed should be on par with other lightweight viewers like feh; but "Lightning" in its name refers primarily to its UX, which allows to randomly open/close images from file manager and zoom/pan into details almost instantly (and also to something which inspired me to create it). You will probably like it if you have lots of downloaded images and photos from gadgets in your desktop computer, prefer to organize/browse them…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! I'd like to share my app for viewing images the way I find comfortable on a desktop computer. No window frame, no menus, no toolbars, just the image itself in transparent fullscreen overlay; pan (move around) with mouse with left button pressed (or keyboard arrows), zoom into point under cursor with scroll (or…
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