Textual Paint

MS Paint in your terminal.

This is a TUI (Text User Interface) image editor, inspired by MS Paint, built with Textual.

This screenshot of Textual Paint is the terminal's screen buffer copied as HTML, wrapped in SVG, placed in HTML inside Markdown.
This might not render correctly in your browser.

Features

Open and save images
- PNG (.png)
- Bitmap (.bmp)
- ANSI (.ans)
  - only supports loading files saved by this program; ANSI files can vary a lot and even encode animations
Tools
- Free-Form Select
- Rectangular Select
- Eraser
  - Color Eraser
- Fill With Color
- Pick Color
- Magnifier
- Pencil
- Brush
- Airbrush
- Text
- Line
- Curve
- Rectangle
- Polygon
- Ellipse
- Rounded Rectangle
Color palette
Undo/Redo
Efficient screen updates and undo/redo history, by tracking regions affected by each action
- You could totally use this program over SSH! Haha, this "what if" project could actually be useful. Of course, it should be mentioned that you can also run graphical programs over SSH, but this might be more responsive, or just fit your vibe better.
Brush previews
Menu bar

Development

Install Textual and Stransi:

pip install "textual[dev]" "stransi"

Run supporting live-reloading CSS:

textual run --dev paint.py

Or run normally:

python paint.py

License

MIT

Unicode Symbols and Emojis for Paint Tools

The first thing I did in this project was to collect possible characters to represent all the tool icons in MS Paint, to gauge how good of a recreation it would be possible to achieve, starting from looks. Unfortunately, I haven't run into any significant roadblocks, so I'm apparently recreating MS Paint. Again.

These are the symbols I've found so far:

Free-Form Select: ✂️📐🆓🕸✨⚝🫥🇫/🇸◌⁛⁘ ⢼⠮
Rectangular Select: ⬚▧🔲 ⣏⣹
Eraser/Color Eraser: 🧼🧽🧹🚫👋🗑️
Fill With Color: 🌊💦💧🌈🎉🎊🪣🫗
Pick Color: 🎨💉💅💧📌📍⤤𝀃🝯🍶
Magnifier: 🔍🔎👀🔬🔭🧐🕵️‍♂️🕵️‍♀️
Pencil: ✏️✎✍️🖎🖊️🖋️✒️🖆📝🖍️
Brush: 🖌️🖌👨‍🎨🧑‍🎨💅
Airbrush: 💨ᖜ╔🧴🥤🫠
Text: 🆎📝📄📃🔤📜AＡ
Line: 📏📉📈⟍𝈏╲⧹\⧵∖
Curve: ↪️🪝🌙〰️◡◠~∼≈∽∿〜〰﹋﹏≈≋～⁓
Rectangle: ▭▬▮▯🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪🟫⬛⬜◼️◻️◾◽▪️▫️
Polygon: ▙𝗟𝙇﹄』⬣⬟🔶🔷🔸🔹🔺🔻△▲
Ellipse: ⬭⭕🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣🟤⚫⚪🫧
Rounded Rectangle: ▢⬜⬛

The default symbols used may not be the best on your particular system, so I may add some kind of configuration for this in the future.

Cursor

A crosshair cursor could use one of +✜✛✚╋╬, but whilst that imitates the look, it might be better to show the pixel under the cursor, i.e. character cell, surrounded by dashes, like this:

 ╻
╺█╸
 ╹

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