Two questions actually: 1) Lets say I've got X11 installed, but no windows manager. Is there a good image viewer I can used that was intended for use in that kind of environment? (Especially good if it doesn't require a mouse.) 2) Lets say I don't even have X11. Is there a good image viewer that renders images as ascii text? I've used cacaview -- but is that really the best there is? I imagine it is not an easy task (converting images to text), but all my images are either unrecognizable or barely recognizable when viewed with cacaview, even if I play with the gamma settings.

1. I use feh as a command line image viewer. If I'm trying to keep the install to a minimum, I only install the X-client package, and remotely log in to view the images. 2. Never thought about this option.

You may want to check out http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aview/ for (2).

1) xv, gqview or xzgv would both work. Gqview is exclusively an x-app, where is xzgv is based on zgv, which is an svgalib app. I have an idea, but I'm not sure if it will work. 2) Using zgv you could even do pictures on freebsd or linux console via sdl or svgalib. However, to use ascii for display, it is possible to use sdl and then invoke the aalib to display jpgs as ascii art on console. To make sdl use aalib: Building SDL: make distclean; ./configure --enable-video-aalib ; make install Running your app: set the environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER to "aalib" To make zgv use sdl as a backend, download the source, change BACKEND=SVGALIB to BACKEND=SDL in config.mk, follow the instructions and go to town. Good luck