Tuesday Tooling: cmdpxl
An image / pixel editor written in Python, in your terminal. Why do we need it? We probably don't but this was a something different that caught my eye.
So What is it?
Created by knosmos, cmdpxl is a command line pixel / image editor which uses WASD to control the cursor, enabling us to create simple pixel images.
So How Do I Install it?
Via pip!
pip install cmdpxl
So How Do I Use it?
We run the cmdpxl command from the terminal and we are asked to specify the path to which we want to save the image. There is no auto-complete, so either save the file to the current directory or make sure you know the correct path. We are then asked for the image dimensions (width x height). I chose an 8 x 8 pixel image size.
You can skip this bit by giving these values when running the command.
cmdpxl -f cool_icon.png -res 8,8
We can also open files using the-fswitch.
To draw an image we first need to pick a colour, the hue (top left) sets the main colour using the u and j keys. Setting the saturation is via the i and k keys and the "val", which seems to be the brightness is set using o and l. In the top right we can see the currently chosen colour.
Once we have a colour we can used wasd to navigate the canvas, and press e to put a pixel of colour on the canvas. If we make a mistake, press z, add filters with t and fill the canvas with f.
Pressing esc will exit cmdpxl, but before it lets you go, it will ask you to save and exit, or exit without saving.
Why?
Well as the readme.md says, "Good Question."
There isn't a real need for a terminal based image editor, it lacks the tools found in GIMP or Photoshop. But it is fun and quirky and yes we could make an image on a remote machine via an SSH connection.
Happy Hacking
Hi reader!