Artwork-TUI: a spreadsheet-driven generative art tool for the terminal
On the Swarm Yard side of the city there is a new kind of workshop. It runs in a terminal, it is free, and its material is the humble spreadsheet. Artwork-TUI turns a grid of cells into generative layouts, then exports them as high-resolution images. No canvas window, no subscription, no hidden layers.
The tool is the work of Andri Berger, a generative-art tinkerer who also builds filterx-tui, a sibling terminal tool for image filters. The pattern there is the constraint: what you type is what happens. What you set in the cells is what the artwork becomes. Artwork-TUI has six tabs, each holding a slice of the design: one for global settings, one for the master layout, others for styling and typography. Elements are addressed like spreadsheet coordinates, A00 to F99, six groups of up to a hundred elements each.
Seeds make the machine honest. The A, B and C groups each carry their own seed button, so the same project file and the same three seeds reproduce the same artwork, run after run. That is a quiet promise for generative work: no accidental one-off, everything can be reopened and inspected cell by cell. The exported JSON is the project file, which means a finished piece doubles as a blueprint.
The rendering engine hides one honest caveat. Artwork-TUI uses Playwright to drive a headless browser, and the install pulls a Chromium build of about 150 megabytes. That is the price of GPU-accelerated WebGL filters and pixel-perfect output. Everything else stays lean: Python 3.11, a GPLv3 license, install scripts for Linux, Arch via AUR, and macOS via Homebrew.
Why this matters here: most generative tools sit at one of two extremes. Frameworks demand code, design apps demand a mouse and a monthly fee. Artwork-TUI parks in the middle, where a terminal and a text editor already live. The workflow is keyboard-driven, previews render inline in kitty or ghostty or wezterm, and a finished artboard can come out at any resolution the machine can handle.
The repository is on GitHub under a GPLv3 license, with the README, install scripts and sample images all in one place. That is the direct link: github.com/andri-berger/artwork-tui. It is young software, five stars and one fork, and it does not care.
■ Filed from Swarm Yard: the Insects, Air wing of the city.