rx is a modern and minimalist pixel editor.

rx is an extensible, modern and minimalist pixel editor, designed with great care and love for artists and hackers. It was conceived to have as little UI as possible, and instead focus on the work.

To achieve this, rx takes inspiration from vi's modal nature and is built around a command system, unique to tools of its kind.

get started

rx can be installed on Linux, macOS and Windows. See the install section for further details. If you'd prefer to download a pre-built binary, see the section on binary releases.

To learn how to use rx, read the guide.
To learn how rx works, browse the source.

community 🧙

The rx community can be found on discord. Come hang out, share your work or discuss ideas around the editor.

goals

Minimal. Small, hackable codebase and dependency footprint. The editor should only include what is necessary.
Beautiful. Clean, modern aesthetics with a strong attention to detail.
Snappy. No perceptible input lag. Update and paint time should be less than 8ms on commodity hardware at 1920x1080.
Configurable & extensible. Artists should be in control of their workflow. If it isn't built-in, it should be easy to extend the editor's functionality.
Resource efficient. Battery drain should be minimized. Memory footprint should be small.

features

Built-in sprite animation support, with live preview.
Work with multiple files simultaneously.
Extensible command system.
Configurable with a simple text-based language.
HiDPI support.
UI scaling.
Undo/redo any edit.
Animated GIF output.
Multi-brush / synchronous editing.
Brush filtering a.k.a. "pixel-perfect" mode.
Visual mode for pixel manipulation.

system requirements

rx currently supports Linux, macOS and Windows with OpenGL 3.3 or later.

install

The following is to install from source. If you'd like to download a pre-built binary, see the next section.

With cargo and cmake installed, run:

cargo install \
    --git https://github.com/cloudhead/rx \
    --tag v0.5.2

This will download the latest stable release of rx and install it under ~/.cargo/bin/rx. If you prefer a different install location, you can specify it via the --root <prefix> flag, where <prefix> is for example /usr/local.

On macOS, Xcode and the Xcode Command Line Tools are required. The latter can be obtained by running xcode-select --install. CMake can be installed with brew install cmake.

binary releases

At the moment, only Linux binaries are available.

linux

rx-0.5.2-x86_64.AppImage

This is an AppImage, a self-contained application. Before opening it, make it executable with chmod +x. You can then double-click it or execute it directly from your terminal.

Feel free to rename it to rx and move it to your PATH. To uninstall, simply delete the file.

support rx 💚

If you find this project useful, consider supporting it.

about

rx was created in 2019 by cloudhead and implemented in the rust programming language.

rx is free software, licensed under the GPL. See the LICENSE file in the code repository for more details.

If you encounter a bug, please open an issue on the tracker, or send an email to rx@cloudhead.io.