Ubunatic Coding
🎮 GTK4 Image Viewer for Linux

SpriteView — Crisp, Smart
Pixel Art & Image Previews

A lightweight GTK4 app for pixel artists and developers. Run spriteview from the terminal, set it as your default image viewer, or use it directly inside GNOME Files — with nearest-neighbor scaling, cursor-centered zoom, sprite animation playback, color palette extraction, a pixel color picker, interactive crop & save, and advanced export options.

Install spriteview CLI View Source Code
Quick Installation Terminal
curl -sSL https://codeberg.org/ubunatic/spriteview/raw/branch/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

What spriteview Does

Lightweight and native — built for pixel artists, game developers, and anyone who opens a lot of PNGs.

Crisp Point Upscaling

Uses sharp nearest-neighbor integer scaling to keep sprite frames crisp and preserve structural pixel grids when expanding images.

Properties Inspector

A dedicated layout panel shows file metadata, original resolution, storage size, and frame counts in real time.

Palette Extraction

Dynamically computes the top 16 colors in any frame. Recycles widgets inside a flow container to keep CPU usage low while playing.

Color Detail Analyzer

Click swatches to resolve their exact Hex, RGBA, and nearest ANSI 256 index/common name definitions inside the properties tab.

Advanced Anim Playback

Includes complete timeline animations (play/pause/steps), a spinbutton FPS speed config, and loop modes selector.

Persistent Settings

Open standalone settings from the window menu to configure default FPS, define custom sequence separators, and manage filename pattern matching rules.

First-Class Standalone App

Use spriteview as your default PNG/GIF viewer system-wide. The installer registers a .desktop entry and MIME associations so it appears in "Open With" and file manager defaults — no Nautilus required.

Interactive Crop & Save

Drag a crop box directly on the preview with pixel-snapped 8-way resize handles and a live dimension indicator. Apply the crop in memory across all frames, then save instantly or use "Save as…" — all without leaving the app.

Advanced Export Options

Open the export dialog to choose format (PNG / GIF / ICO / WebM), scale (1× – 8× or custom) with Nearest Neighbor or Bilinear filter, reduce the color palette down to 2–256 colors with optional shared-palette across frames, and map to the ANSI 256 terminal color space.

Folder Navigation

Step through every image in the same folder with the prev/next buttons in the title bar or the Page Up / Page Down keyboard shortcuts — no need to reopen the file picker between images.

Installation Steps

Deploy the extension to Nautilus on modern Linux distributions in minutes.

1

Install OS Bindings

SpriteView is built on GTK4 and requires the Python bindings for Nautilus. Select and run the command for your Linux distribution:

Ubuntu / Debian / Linux Mint
sudo apt install python3-nautilus
Fedora / RHEL
sudo dnf install nautilus-python
Arch Linux / Manjaro
sudo pacman -S nautilus-python
2

Deploy via Script

Execute the official one-liner script. It downloads the source, registers the Nautilus extension, and automatically reloads Nautilus:

curl -sSL https://codeberg.org/ubunatic/spriteview/raw/branch/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
3

Restart & Run

Right-click any supported image (PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, JPG) in Nautilus and choose "Preview Sprite Sheet" or "Preview Image" from the menu.

4

Use Standalone CLI Mode

The installer also deploys a standalone spriteview CLI executable to ~/.local/bin/spriteview. You can run it standalone to view or export sprites directly from your terminal:

Preview files, sequences, or open a folder in the file picker
spriteview path/to/sprite_01.png
Headless export (omit format to open advanced GUI dialog)
spriteview path/to/sprite_01.png --export gif

See spriteview --help for details, including standalone configuration (--settings) and info (--about).