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Show HN: Electro – A hyper-fast Windows image viewer with a built-in terminal

by Tinos on 2/24/25, 8:50 PM with 40 comments

• by fsiefken on 2/24/25, 9:53 PM

  That's fast! It seems even faster then using mpv, even though you can't use it like this from the command line.

  mpv *.jpeg --shuffle --loop-playlist --image-display-duration=2.0 --fullscreen

  I remember, 30 years ago there were similar ultrafast image viewers for DOS, they didn't even need windows. I was partial to QPV/386, but there were others. Linux console has fim. It was great to be able to zoom and pan with the keyboard.

  https://www.nongnu.org/fbi-improved/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/png-the-definitive/9781...

• by textadventure on 2/24/25, 9:17 PM

  I share your frustration so I love that it is so fast/lightweight, cool project. I personally don't think I would have much use for a built-in terminal. I would just like for it to let you browse through whatever other images in the same folder from the image I opened with and be able to navigate it with the keyboard.

  Images should also resize whenever the window is resized. Those two changes alone would make this very usable.

• by roadbuster on 2/24/25, 9:29 PM

  > I was always so frustrated by how slow image viewers were on Windows

  Irfanview was always my go-to for speed on Windows

• by vachina on 2/25/25, 1:19 AM

  Or you can restore the Windows 7 image viewer[0]. Works on Windows 11 still.

  [0]https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14312-restore-windows-ph...

• by bdhcuidbebe on 2/24/25, 10:04 PM

  Cool! Any plans for linux/macOS?

  I’m currently using oculante specifically for its speed, rust and cross platform.

  Not sure this electro viewer is for me, as I see typescript and css frontend.

• by CyberDildonics on 2/25/25, 4:31 PM

  Is it really "hyperfast" if it's just opening a microsoft edge webview window?

  Is it really faster than the image viewers made 20 years ago that open a window with the win32 API?

• by dusted on 2/25/25, 10:59 PM

  How is it that the preview-videos showing how fast it is, is still slower at loading small image than it is for my old desktop to START feh AND display the window and image ?

• by Narew on 2/25/25, 8:37 AM

  Does anyone know a similar image viewer but that manage correctly the colorspace of the image and the colorspace of the screen ?

• by rkagerer on 2/25/25, 1:48 AM

  Dumb question, is there some kind of "tiles" view to quickly scroll through a directory of photos?

• by BenFranklin100 on 2/25/25, 3:33 AM

  How does this work with large (i .e. ~30,000 by 40,000 pixel) 16 bit TIFF images?

• by eipi10_hn on 2/25/25, 3:15 AM

  Thanks a lot for your project. Have you compared the speed with JPEGView?

• by eviks on 2/25/25, 2:21 AM

  "Hyperfast" should show the startup time vs another app.

• by haddonist on 2/24/25, 10:32 PM

  Why does Electro make multiple web requests on startup? Why does it need to make any?

  And forcing windows to make your app a default, without asking the user about it at install time - not cool.