Catpix_Minimagick_HD

Renders images in the terminal.

This project is a "port" from pazdera's catpix repo.

The original project is based on RMagick while this one is compatible with MiniMagick. I made this project in hope that MiniMagick would speed up the original gem and some other mini-magick fans will be able to use this awesome feature in their minimagick projects.

I would probably switch over to rmagick for serious projects in the future. I just did not want to invest effort in switching from mini-magick to rmagick in my main app so I think this 1 day work is pretty useful.

Example

$ catpix_mini pokemon.gif

More examples and options

$ catpix_mini panda.png -c xy
$ catpix_mini trophy.png -w 0.5 -h 0.5
$ catpix_mini tux.png -c xy -r high # enforce high resolution

For more examples and APIs please check out pazdera's catpix repo. They should be very similar at this point except that the binary name is changed from catpix to catpix_mini.

Performances

MiniMagick is supposed to be lighter and faster since it provides only a thin wrapper around the ImageMagick command-line toolset. I have done a bit of testing and find that catpix_mini has upper advantage when rendering large image while catpix is slightly faster for smaller image.

time catpix ./img/benchmark.jpg  
48.25s user 0.56s system 87% cpu 55.578 total

time catpix_mini ./img/benchmark.jpg  
42.26s user 0.76s system 83% cpu 51.647 total

Note: I have done not many benchmarks, and performance is not super important in my case. All I need is to be able to include catpix in my powered-by-minimagick project. So please do some more proper tests and let me know your results.

Quality

RMagick return pixels' colours in 16-bit by default while MiniMagick colour is only 8-bit therefor the quality at high-res looks slightly better in catpix compared to catpix-mini.

Only slightly because the quality printed out to terminal is not too insanely detailed to begin with.

Transparency

Due to the performance advantage is not too impressive, I have not invested time to do pixel reading per pixel to detect alpha channel for the image. Therefor transparent images printed out by catpix_mini will be in white-background.

Another disadvantage of mini-magick.

About Me

AJAX Amsterdamche and Chandler Bing's big fan.