There’s a certain folly to working on images with Emacs. Certainly there are far better tools designed to do this. However the compelling use case for viewing and editing an image in Emacs is flow, particularly if the editing is relatively simple. More often than not, you already have access to an image file in Emacs. Why not make simple edits to it and stay in Emacs?

To accomplish the above, Emacs provides the built-in package image-mode. I’ll be blunt - I think image-mode has terrible naming of commands and variables, confusing documentation, and arcane bindings. Mouse operations with it are crude. The point must be on the image itself or commands will not work making for a brittle user experience. But if flow is important enough to compel you to using it, I figure you might as well get comfortable.

Announcing Casual Image, a re-imagining of the user interface for image-mode, now available as part of the Casual user interfaces on MELPA. This interface deviates significantly with naming conventions used by image-mode to be more in alignment with conventional image editing tools. It also adds the ability to resize an image file as opposed to resizing a view of it.

Here’s a screenshot:

Casual Image requires that you have ImageMagick installed (either version 6.x or 7.x) to support the resize feature.

Of all the Casual interfaces, this is arguably the most opinionated one due to the name changes. That said, these opinions are hopefully much less surprising. I invite you to give Casual Image a try.

emacs