Zoom in on small photos without losing pixel crispness

I'm working on some pixel art but when I preview it in something like eye of gnome, the image gets blurry instead of showing crisp pixels. I know this sounds backwards, but how do I prevent that?

Opening the file in GIMP shows crisp pixels as expected but GIMP is really big to just view photos quickly.

Silly me; there's an option in eog for smoothing images when zoomed in and out...

I guess this just goes to show that over thinking something makes you look stupid when you fail to find the obvious... However, I'll leave the question here so others can benefit if they made the same blunder I did.