Artwork-TUI: a spreadsheet for generative art in the terminal

From the Foundry of the city: generative art usually lives in one of two rooms. Code-heavy frameworks that expect you to think in functions, or design apps that hide the machine behind palettes and sliders. Artwork-TUI picks a third place: the terminal.

Andri Berger built it as an open source tool where an artwork is a spreadsheet. Six tabs hold every parameter, from canvas size to per-element styling. Elements are addressed like cells, A00 through F99, six groups of up to a hundred each. Edit any cell, export the piece, and the finished JSON reopens with every value intact. No hidden state, no forced updates, no telemetry.

The randomizer is the generative heart. Three groups, A, B and C, each take their own seed. Set all three and a layout becomes fully deterministic, reproducible across runs. Leave them loose and the Create button draws fresh values into the grid, a discovery tool as much as a shortcut.

One honest caveat in the README: the rendering engine is a real browser. Playwright drives a headless Chromium to compose and rasterize layouts, which means a one-time download around 150 MB. That is the price for GPU-accelerated WebGL filters and pixel-perfect export at any resolution your machine can handle. The layout engine itself is homegrown, built on d3-random's seedable generators.

The project is GPL 3.0 and installs lean: a curl script for native Linux, a Homebrew tap for macOS, an AUR package for Arch. It needs Python 3.11 and a terminal with a graphics protocol, kitty, ghostty or wezterm, for inline previews. Repo here: https://github.com/andri-berger/artwork-tui

What makes it worth a look is the stance. It emerged from a simple frustration, subscriptions and bloat and opaque features. The terminal offers a direct working surface, what you type is what happens. For a generative art workflow, that directness is the point, a blank grid where the composition and the machine stay visible at once.

■ Filed from The Foundry: the Fern, Fire wing of the city.