snacks.image supported in WSL2?

[michaelrommel]

Hello,

I am using Wezterm on Windows to connect to a local WSL2 domain (not via SSH). When using yazi, image preview does work.

Running in neovim 0.12 the image does not get displayed and even after setting TERM to wezterm and SNACKS_WEZTERM=true checkhealth reports:

Snacks.image ~
-  OK setup {enabled}
-  OK 'wezterm' `wezterm 20240203-110809-5046fc22`
-  OK 'magick' `Version: ImageMagick 7.1.1-43 Q16 x86_64 22550 https://imagemagick.org`
-  OK 'convert' `Version: ImageMagick 7.1.1-43 Q16 x86_64 22550 https://imagemagick.org`
-  OK `wezterm` detected and supported
-  WARNING `wezterm` does not support placeholders. Fallback rendering will be used
-  WARNING Inline images are disabled
-  OK Terminal Dimensions:
  {size}: `0` x `0` pixels
  {scale}: `1.00`
  {cell}: `0` x `0` pixels
-  OK Available Treesitter languages:
  `javascript`, `markdown_inline`, `markdown`
-  WARNING Missing Treesitter languages:
  `css`, `html`, `latex`, `norg`, `scss`, `svelte`, `tsx`, `typst`, `vue`
-  WARNING Image rendering in docs with missing treesitter parsers won't work
-  OK 'gs' `10.05.1`
-  OK PDF files are supported
-  ERROR None of the tools found: 'tectonic', 'pdflatex'
-  WARNING `tectonic` or `pdflatex` is required to render LaTeX math expressions
-  ERROR Tool not found: 'mmdc'
-  WARNING `mmdc` is required to render Mermaid diagrams
-  OK your terminal supports the kitty graphics protocol

There is an empty rectangle with a rounded border displayed, 1 cell wide and 30 cells in height (I set the max width and height to 80x30)

It seems that the calculation of the Windows size is not working. When I connect to the same WSL instance via SSH, then an image is displayed, but at a wrong place and the size is still not working and is evaluated to 0x0.

Has anyone had luck with snacks.image in WSL2?

[michaelrommel]

Thanks for the first replies - I may have expressed myself improperly. I am not using Windows Neovim inside Windows Wezterm.

I am using Windows Wezterm to connect to a local WSL2 domain (not via SSH). There I start the linux neovim. With linux yazi or imgcat I can display images using sixel or kitty protocol.

Inside neovim I see the following when going with the cursor over an image link in a markdown document.

This is using today's nightly Wezterm Version. neovim is NVIM v0.12.0-dev-934+ga9a4c271b1 So the update did not make any difference.

[drowning-cat]

I’m experiencing the same problem when running wsl inside WezTerm.exe. We’ll need to wait for Folke to return and fix it.

[drowning-cat]

Though I’m not sure whether the issue is with the terminal, WSL or snacks.nvim.

[lsw9521]

I’m running Win 24H2 (Intel Core Ultra 5 225H) and, through WSL2 + Ubuntu 24.04 with Ghostty + Yazi + Neovim + snacks.image, Markdown image preview in WSL2 works perfectly!

Getting inline Markdown image preview to work properly on a Windows laptop cost me an enormous amount of time and countless experiments. I tried many setups — local Kitty, WezTerm, or Kitty/WezTerm inside WSL — and every attempt was either a complete failure after overcoming lots of hurdles, or barely working but with terrible Neovim scrolling performance. (I researched many GPU config approaches via AI and tweaked them, but the results were still frustrating.)

In the end, I settled on WSL2 + Ghostty. As long as you install both Ghostty and Neovim inside WSL2, all subsequent configuration will be smooth sailing. After that, you can freely reference others’ configs and easily replicate them.

At first, I was stuck on WezTerm’s Lua configuration power and selection mode, but it just doesn’t run well in WSL2 right now (Kitty support is incomplete, WebGPU setup is problematic). And the Windows version of WezTerm will never get you over the hurdle of inline Markdown image preview.

So — unless you are absolutely tied to WezTerm — I recommend switching to Ghostty. It’s at least a 100% working solution in my own testing. With other options, you can’t even be sure if the outcome will be reliable.

[michaelrommel]

Thank you for the suggestion. If I get this correctly then I would need to configure WSL2 and WSLg to be able to run graphical linux programs. So starting ghostty on linux and have it displayed on the Windows side and use neovim then therein... I might explore that option, but honestly I am trying to keep the WSL installation small and not bloat it with all that graphical libraries and daemons etc.

At the moment I have my image preview in the terminal via yazi, where it works beautiful inside tmux even. The sole use case was writing markdown articles and this is non-critical. Just a convenience feature.

But thank you very much for the suggestion and confirmation that this works for you. I'll leave the discussion open, maybe an answer surfaces in a few weeks...

[michaelrommel]

So I now tried it in an older WSL2 installation with bookworm, where I had WSLg already installed. Both wezterm and ghostty were then displaying the image, but both also showed one line displacement of the image.

No other difference (apart from the fact that I was unable to resize the Wezterm window, because no drag handles appeared). And once I resized the window with neovim open, ghostty reported:

warning(stream): ignoring CSI t with unimplemented parameter: ESC [ { 8, 44, 175 } t and from then on refused to show the window with
warning(kitty_gfx): erroneous kitty graphics response: ENOENT: image not found

But I do not think that this additional complexity is worth the hassle.