viewinline

name	viewinline
description	Terminal viewer for rasters, vectors, and tabular data. Use for quick visual inspection without leaving the shell—preview images in a folder gallery, inspect geospatial files after GDAL workflows, explore CSV data with histograms/scatter plots, or verify files before commit. Non-interactive; everything controlled via command-line flags.
tags	["visualization","terminal","raster","vector","csv","geospatial","gdal","ml","inspection","workflow"]

Viewinline Skill

Quick-look terminal viewer for geospatial and tabular data. Think of it as ls for visual files—designed for command-line workflows where you want to inspect data without leaving the terminal or opening a separate application.

Renders natively in iTerm2, WezTerm, Konsole, Rio, and Contour. Falls back to chafa (ASCII art with 24-bit color) in other terminals like kitty, Ghostty, Terminal.app, VS Code, and Linux terminals. Works over SSH without X11 forwarding or VNC.

When to Use

• File browsing: find . -name "*.jpg" | xargs -n1 viewinline to visually scan results
• Gallery view: viewinline path/to/folder --gallery 4x3 to preview all images in a directory
• Band inspection: Display specific bands of a raster as a grid: --bands 10-50 or --bands 11,15,30,45
• Geospatial workflows: Inspect raster/vector outputs after GDAL transformations
• ML training data: Review training image galleries without switching windows
• Data exploration: Quick CSV visualizations (histograms, scatter plots, summary stats)
• Pre-commit checks: Verify images, maps, and data files before pushing
• Remote servers: Works over SSH from your local terminal

Supported Formats

Rasters: GeoTIFF, PNG, JPEG, NetCDF, HDF5, HDF4
Vectors: GeoJSON, Shapefile, GeoPackage, GeoParquet
Tabular: CSV, Parquet (with pyarrow)

Core Flags

Raster Display:

• --rgb R G B — Specify band order for RGB (e.g., --rgb 4 3 2)
• --rgbfiles R.tif G.tif B.tif — Create RGB composite from separate files
• --band N — Display specific band or NetCDF timestep
• --bands RANGE — Display multiple bands as a grid (e.g., 10-50 or 11,15,30,45)
• --gallery NxM — Show all images in folder as thumbnails (e.g., 4x3 grid)
• --colormap NAME — Apply colormap (e.g., plasma, viridis, terrain)
• --vmin VAL --vmax VAL — Set min/max for scaling
• --display SCALE — Resize displayed output (0.5=smaller, 2=bigger)

Vector Display:

• --color-by COLUMN — Color features by attribute value
• --colormap NAME — Apply colormap to coloring
• --width W — Line width for boundaries
• --edgecolor COLOR — Edge color (hex or named)
• --table — Display as tabular data instead of rendering geometry

Tabular Data (CSV/Parquet):

• --describe [COL] — Summary statistics for all numeric columns or one
• --hist [COL] — Histograms for numeric columns
• --scatter X Y — Scatter plot of two columns
• --where EXPR — Filter rows (DuckDB required): --where "year > 2010"
• --sort COL — Sort by column (ascending); use --desc for descending
• --limit N — Limit output rows
• --select COL1 COL2 — Choose specific columns to display
• --sql QUERY — Full DuckDB SQL (use data as table name)

NetCDF/HDF:

• --subset N — Select variable by index
• --band N or --timestep N — Select slice along time/band axis
• --reduce DIM_NAME — Override auto-detected band axis for non-standard dimensions

Examples

Image browsing

# Browse all JPGs in directory
find . -name "*.jpg" | xargs viewinline

# Gallery of all images in a folder (4 columns × 3 rows)
viewinline path/to/images --gallery 4x3

Raster workflows

# Display single band
viewinline data.tif --band 2

# RGB composite from three bands
viewinline multiband.tif --rgb 4 3 2

# Create RGB from separate files
viewinline R.tif G.tif B.tif

# Display band range as gallery
viewinline hyperspectral.tif --bands 10-50 --gallery 5x5

# Apply colormap with min/max scaling
viewinline temp.nc --subset 1 --colormap plasma --vmin 273 --vmax 310

GDAL verification

# Reproject and check result
gdalwarp -t_srs EPSG:3857 input.tif temp.tif
viewinline temp.tif --colormap terrain

# Resample and verify
gdal_translate -outsize 50% 50% temp.tif output.tif
viewinline output.tif

Vector inspection

# View vector file
viewinline boundaries.geojson

# Color features by attribute, with colormap
viewinline boundaries.geoparquet --color-by population --colormap viridis

# View vector as tabular data
viewinline counties.shp --table
viewinline data.geoparquet --table --where "POP > 100000" --sort POP --desc

Data exploration

# Preview CSV
viewinline data.csv

# Summary statistics
viewinline data.parquet --describe

# Histograms for all numeric columns
viewinline data.csv --hist

# Scatter plot
viewinline data.csv --scatter area_km2 year

# Filter and sort
viewinline data.csv --where "year > 2010" --sort population --desc

# SQL query
viewinline data.csv --sql "SELECT * FROM data WHERE area > 100 ORDER BY year"

# Batch CSV inspection with xargs (use -I {} to control argument order)
find . -name "*.csv" | xargs -n1 -I {} viewinline {} --describe

Tips

• Use --gallery to quickly preview batches of training images or search results
• Pipe with xargs: find . -newer file.txt | xargs viewinline to inspect recent changes
• Add aliases: alias check='viewinline --describe --hist'
• Works in tmux if outer terminal is iTerm2; falls back to ASCII art in other terminals
• Install chafa for better coverage: brew install chafa (macOS), apt install chafa (Linux)
• SSH-friendly: images render on your local terminal, not the remote server