Xv

xv

xv running on Linux
Developer(s)	John Bradley
Stable release	3.10a / 1994-12-29
Operating system	Unix-like, VMS
Type	Image viewer
License	Shareware
Website	www.trilon.com/xv/

Xv is also a common abbreviation for the X video extension.

xv is a shareware program written by John Bradley to display and modify digital images under the X Window System.

While popular in the early 1990s (perhaps then the dominant Unix image viewer), no official releases have been made since December 1994. Bradley was unable to negotiate the LZW licence necessary for decoding the then-popular GIF format.

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 (in 2007) 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.

xv is still present in the Slackware 12.2 and openSUSE 11.2 Linux distributions, although it is no longer bundled with most distributions.

See also

• Comparison of image viewers

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
• http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/CV.html A fast image viewer loosely modeled after XV and optimised for big directories

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