Aether

A minimal, fast, cross-platform image viewer in C++17 + Qt Widgets.

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Requirements

• Qt 6 (recommended) or Qt 5 (QtWidgets), any version ≥ 5.15
• C++17 compiler (GCC/Clang)
• CMake ≥ 3.16
• On Linux with Wayland, qtwayland so the window gets the Wayland platform plugin.

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Build Instructions

On NixOS

The repo ships a flake that provides the whole toolchain pinned to nixos-unstable (GCC, CMake, pkg-config, qt6.qtbase, qt6.qtwayland, clangd, gdb), with QT_PLUGIN_PATH pre-configured so the Wayland/X11 platform plugins are found:

nix develop                                 # enter the dev shell
cmake -B build                              # configure
cmake --build build                         # compile
./build/aether path/to/photo.jpg            # run

If you use direnv, nix develop runs automatically when you enter the directory (the repo contains an .envrc).

On other distributions

Choose the command to install dependencies as per your distro's package manager.

sudo apt install qt6-base-dev qt6-wayland cmake g++     # Debian/Ubuntu
# or
sudo dnf install qt6-qtbase-devel cmake gcc-c++         # Fedora 
# or
sudo pacman -S qt6-base cmake gcc                       # Arch Linux

Build & Run via the following commands:

cmake -B build
cmake --build build
./build/aether path/to/photo.jpg

CMakeLists.txt prefers Qt 6 and falls back to Qt 5 if only that is installed.

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