pandite

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Pandite

Sick and tired of slow or unresponsive image viewers? Pandite is for you.

Performance | Formats | Features | Install | Build

Pandite is a GPU image viewer for Windows, macOS and Linux, written in Rust with wgpu. It is one executable of 12 MiB. It has no account, no telemetry and no network code.

Made for people who are sick of image viewers that lock up and take their time to show a picture.

Performance

Time from program start to the picture on screen. Machine: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, Windows 11, Direct3D 12.

File	GPU	First picture	Full resolution
Sony ARW, 9504 x 6336 (60 MP)	NVIDIA RTX 5090	47 to 60 ms	47 to 60 ms
Sony ARW, 9504 x 6336 (60 MP)	AMD Radeon integrated	356 to 389 ms	356 to 389 ms
Sony JPEG, camera original	AMD Radeon integrated	181 ms	571 ms
JPEG, 1280 x 720	NVIDIA RTX 5090	56 ms	56 ms

The test suite fails when a first picture takes longer than 200 ms for ARW or 300 ms for JPEG on the discrete GPU.

How Pandite gets these times:

Every file read and decode runs on a worker thread. The window never waits for a file, also not for a stalled cloud or network file.
The next and previous images and the thumbnails decode ahead, inside a fixed memory budget. One thread stays free for the image you select.
Camera files show their embedded preview first, then the full image.
Decoders use SIMD. Textures get a full mipmap chain on the GPU.
On Windows, Pandite stays in the background after you close it and keeps the GPU device and the thumbnails of the last folder. The next image opens without a new program start.

Formats

37 file extensions. Details and limits: docs/formats.md.

Format	Extensions	Notes
JPEG	.jpg .jpeg .jpe .jfif	Baseline, progressive, lossless. Gray, YCbCr, RGB, CMYK, YCCK
PNG, APNG	.png .apng	Every color type and bit depth. Animation
GIF	.gif	Animation
WebP	.webp	Lossy, lossless, alpha. Animation
AVIF	.avif	8, 10 and 12-bit, alpha, HDR (PQ, HLG)
HEIC, HEIF	.heic .heif .hif	Codec of the operating system. Not on Linux
JPEG XL	.jxl	Stills and animation, HDR
TIFF	.tif .tiff	Integer to 32-bit, float to 64-bit. LZW, Deflate, PackBits, JPEG, CCITT
BMP	.bmp .dib	1 to 32 bits per pixel, RLE, bit fields
Targa	.tga	Color-mapped, true-color, gray, RLE
Icon, cursor	.ico .cur	Largest image in the file
QOI	.qoi
DDS	.dds	Legacy and DX10 headers, BC compression
KTX2	.ktx2	Uncompressed, BC, ETC, EAC, ASTC
OpenEXR	.exr	HDR, tone mapped
Radiance HDR	.hdr	HDR, tone mapped
SVG	.svg	System fonts, embedded and linked images
Photoshop	.psd	Stored composite image
Camera RAW	.dng .cr2 .cr3 .nef .arw .raf .orf .rw2 .pef .srw	See docs/formats.md

Writes PNG, JPEG, lossless WebP and BMP.

Features

Gallery strip. Thumbnails of the folder along the bottom. G shows or hides it.
Zoom. Fit, 1:1 and zoom at the pointer. Past 3x, each image pixel is a crisp square.
Edit. Rotate, flip, crop and resize with undo. Save as PNG, JPEG, WebP or BMP.
Bulk convert. Convert and resize a set of files or a whole folder.
Text in images. Select and copy the text in a picture with the mouse. Windows reads it with its own recognizer. On macOS and Linux, a recognizer built into Pandite reads Latin scripts and Chinese. Both work offline.
Image information. I shows file size, pixel size, codec, channels, bit depth, compression ratio, color profile and camera settings.
Copy. Ctrl+C copies the image, Ctrl+Shift+C copies the file path.
Delete. Del sends the file to the Recycle Bin or the Trash and shows the next image. Shift+Del asks first, then deletes the file for good.
Select. Space or Shift+arrows select images, which show a badge in the gallery strip and a “Marked” label on screen. Del, M (move to a folder), Shift+M (copy to a folder) and bulk convert then act on the selected images.
Color. Embedded ICC profiles convert to sRGB. HDR images are tone mapped. Photos turn upright from their EXIF orientation.
Stall safe. A file stuck on a cloud drive cannot freeze the window. Esc always quits at once.
Offline. No account, no telemetry, no network code. CI checks that no networking library is linked.

Keys: docs/shortcuts.md, or F1 in the program. Text recognition: docs/text-recognition.md.

Install

With npx (Windows, macOS, Linux)

This needs Node.js 18 or later.

npx pandite

The command always installs the latest release of Pandite for your user. It reads the releases on GitHub each time it runs, and it checks the download against SHA256SUMS.txt. When an older Pandite is installed, the same command updates it.

To install a newer release only when one exists:

npx pandite update

To install one named release:

npx pandite -v 0.2.5

To remove Pandite:

npx pandite uninstall

npx keeps the installer that it downloaded before. To get the newest installer also, add @latest:

npx pandite@latest

From the release files

The files are on the releases page. In the commands, replace <version> with the version of the file.

Windows x64 and ARM64, setup program. Run pandite-<version>-<arch>-windows-setup.exe. It installs for your user, without administrator rights, and associates image files. It is not code-signed: at the SmartScreen warning, select More info, then Run anyway.

Windows x64 and ARM64, portable. Extract pandite-<version>-<arch>-windows-portable.zip. To add Pandite to Open with and Default apps, run this command once in the extracted folder:

.\pandite.exe --register

macOS 11 or later. Open pandite-<version>-universal-macos.dmg and drag Pandite to Applications. The app is signed and notarized by Apple.

Debian and Ubuntu x86_64, glibc 2.35 or later.

sudo apt install ./pandite_<version>_amd64.deb

Fedora and openSUSE x86_64, glibc 2.35 or later.

sudo dnf install ./pandite-<version>-1.x86_64.rpm

Other Linux x86_64, glibc 2.35 or later. This installs for your user:

tar -xzf pandite-<version>-x86_64-linux.tar.gz
cd pandite-<version>-x86_64-linux
./install.sh

On Windows, HEIC needs “HEIF Image Extensions” and “HEVC Video Extensions” from the Microsoft Store.

Omarchy

npx pandite asks about both steps on a first install and does them for you. To do both steps for a Pandite that is installed, run:

npx pandite --default --float

To do the steps by hand, use these commands. The desktop entry of Pandite is pandite.desktop.

Make Pandite the default viewer for every format that it opens:

desktop=$(ls ~/.local/share/applications/pandite.desktop /usr/share/applications/pandite.desktop 2>/dev/null | head -n 1)
xdg-mime default pandite.desktop $(grep '^MimeType=' "$desktop" | cut -d= -f2 | tr ';' ' ')

Make sure that the default is set. This command must print pandite.desktop:
```
xdg-mime query default image/jpeg
```
To open Pandite as a floating window, add this line at the bottom of ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.lua:
```
o.window("pandite", { tag = "+floating-window" })
```

The system can report a Sony ARW file as image/tiff and not as image/x-sony-arw. Step 1 sets Pandite for both types, so ARW files open in Pandite. To see the type of a file, run:

xdg-mime query filetype <file>

Command line

pandite [options] [--] [<image>]

  --config-dir <dir>  keep settings in this folder
  --background        Windows: start hidden and wait for the first image
  --quit              Windows: end the pandite that waits in the background
  --register          Windows: add pandite to Open with and Default apps
                      for every supported file type (this user only)
  --unregister        Windows: remove what --register added
  -h, --help          show this help
  -V, --version       show the version

Settings file: %APPDATA%\pandite\settings.ini on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/pandite/settings.ini on macOS, ~/.config/pandite/settings.ini on Linux. The file explains each setting.

Build

Rust 1.87 or later on Windows, 1.91 or later on macOS and Linux. Linux needs the libraries in docs/building.md.

cargo build --release -p pandite-app
./target/release/pandite

Store packaging: docs/store-submission.md (Microsoft Store), docs/mac-app-store.md (Mac App Store and App Sandbox test build).

License

MIT. Third-party licenses: docs/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

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