I previously used Viewnior to display gifanims. It worked beautifully for a long time, then mysteriously stopped recently. I tried recompiling it, but it still doesn't work. I assume some other recently installed program altered a library it was relying upon. It could take days solving this so instead I started searching for something else that could do the job.
The first thing I came up with was
ImageMagick, which I already had installed. The only problem is that normal gifs are shown with the
display command, whereas animgifs require
animate. Both these come as part of the ImageMagick package, but I ideally wanted something that automatically displayed either formats correctly.
Next I tried
gifview, which is in the
gifsicle package. It works brilliantly, but for some reason the animate function is turned off by default. No problem. It's easy to set on. Just invoke it with the -a option, for example
gifview -a stupidanim.gif to automatically display "stupidanim.gif" as an animated gif. Using the -a option on when viewing non-animated gifs doesn't cause any problems so I have it set up to run via a small script with the command:
gifview -a "$@"
The gifsicle package contains gifsicle, gifview, and gifdiff. It lets you create, manipulate, display, compare, and get information from gifs and gifanims and is surprisingly small.
I did find out about a few other gifanim displayers, like xanim and mirage, but I'd previously had a terrible time trying to compile xanim and after finding gifsicle's gifview I haven't bothered looking further.
I should also note that
Gimp lets you display animgifs as animations. It lets you create them too, of course. There is a tutorial on the Gimp site on how to do so:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/
