Show HN: I built an offline, open‑source desktop Pixel Art Editor in Python
github.comIt requires no registration, no installation, and no configuration. Just run it on any computer and start drawing freely.
It requires no registration, no installation, and no configuration. Just run it on any computer and start drawing freely.
Related: I know that many people use AI image generators to make pixel art, and recently I've stumbled upon a great tool to make a proper pixelart based on AI generated input see https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js and live demo on https://jenissimo.itch.io/unfaker (disclaimer: I don't know the author, just thought I'd share as I find it amazing)
Which AI pixel art generator?
Very nice to see that this project is hand-crafted and not AI-generated like 99% of the submissions here
So, congrats on your release.
When I clicked I already thought about the comments that ask "is this vibe coded". So I kind of asked myself that question. As someone who manually codes as well as experiments with AI-assisted coding I ask myself what attitude we should develop towards AI-assisted coding in the long run. Right now on HN it almost seems like "AI shaming" at work. If you post a project that's a result of using AI you can expect a lot of critique around here. While I understand that to a certain extent I guess we also need to overcome that sentiment. After all we don't blame people using IDEs, code completion or other tools that have become the norm.
It would be similar to me posting “Show HN: I built a turbo encabulator in Rust” and I actually hired coders from Craigslist to bring my idea to life.
To modify the popular phrase: "If you didn't bother to code it, why would I bother reviewing it?"
Providing feedback to an author is only valuable if the author at least knows why they did something, so you can discuss how it's good or how it's not.
How much help by an LLM would you allow for someone to say they coded it themselves?
> After all we don't blame people using IDEs, code completion or other tools that have become the norm.
Because those don’t have the same issues. It’s not like IDEs, LSPs, and other tools were the target of warranted criticism and then we stopped. Rather, they never received this kind of backlash in the first place.
No IDE has ever caused millions of people absolutely unrelated to it to have to ration water.
https://archive.ph/20250731222011/https://m.economictimes.co...
To use an exaggerated analogy, it’s like saying “people are complaining about arsenic being added to food but we need to overcome that sentiment, after all we don’t blame people adding salt and pepper which have become the norm”.
If that's the reason why people dunk on ai-assisted programming, fine.
That's not the impression I had though, the criticism I usually see is around laziness, low-effort submissions, etc... Which are not inherent issues of using llms.
> Which are not inherent issues of using llms.
But they are exacerbated by them, so the criticism still stands. No one visits HN for low-quality same-loking submissions. It’s like frequenting r/toolgifs and suddenly almost every post is about one specific hammer. That’d be understandably annoying, and while not the inherent fault of the hammer, it would be an issue only possible because it exists.
I don't disagree, it's annoying. But what's the solution here? Bashing quality submissions because they use AI?
Even if LLMs don't succeed in their seemingly ultimate goal of replacing humans, and I don't think they will, there's no future where we completely stop using them.
I guess either we find out a way to filter out ai-slop or we wait until people are tired of rehashing the same low-effort criticisms.
Now you seem like one of the few people that is concerned over environmental issues and I respect that, if that's why people are against them it's a whole other discussion and we can disregard anything I said here.
TLDR: That article is pretty low quality, and the "caused millions of people absolutely unrelated to it to have to ration water" doesn't seem like a reasonable conclusion. It's not mentioned at all in the source article. I took some notes on this article and traced back the research to the original article by The Austin Chronicle which is significantly better: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2025-07-25/texas-is-sti... , would recommend.
Main takeaways:
- Why are we building data centres so close to the equator where it's hot.
- It's depressing to see the high quality reporting from The Austin Chronicle watered down into more and more clickbaity soundbytes as it gets recycled through other "news" orgs. But at the same time, I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise.
- The water evaporation was interesting to me, and would love to read more on what percentage evaporates, and whether the Stargate plans to build non-evaporative cooling will actually hold out and how that'll impact the water grid.
- Would love some more info/context on that 463 mil number, but stopping my research here for now. Combining this with when/how often Texas has to ration its water would provide a stronger argument in support/against the provided claim of water rationing.
- The fact that we don't have good numbers for how much water data centres are using is crazy, we need that level of granularity/regulation.
- Markers of poor reporting:
- Numbers without context/clarity. Would it kill these sites to include a bar chart.
- Citations of sites that market engaging/entertaining
- Ambiguous / contradictory data
- Ambiguous references
Notes:
Interesting article! A few weird things:
1. The most cited reference is to a site called "Techie + Gamers", which self-describes itself as "TechieGamers.com is a leading destination for engaging entertainment coverage, news, net worths and TV shows with a strong focus on Shark Tank." Makes me suspicious of the journalistic quality of this and that article.
2. In the headline it says "Texas AI centers guzzle 463 million gallons". Further down it says "According to a July 2025 investigation by The Austin Chronicle, data centers across Central Texas, including Microsoft and US Army Corps facilities in San Antonio, used a combined 463 million gallons of water in 2023 and 2024 alone, as reported by Techie + Gamers." Over 2023 and 2024? Odd that it's giving the sum over 2 years. And not sure what it means that it includes the US Army? Also without any context I don't know what this number means.
- I checked the TechieGamers article and this contradicts what is written there, which says the 463 million number is for San Antonio alone.
3. Robert Mace, executive director of The Meadows Center for Water, notes that "once water evaporates, it's gone." This is interesting, not sure how much water is actually evaporated vs returned to the grid.
4. "The scale of water use is massive, as the Texas Water Development Board projections estimate that data centers in the state will consume 49 billion gallons of water in 2025, soaring to nearly 400 billion gallons by 2030, as per Techie + Gamers report. That’s about 7% of Texas’s total projected water use, according to the report." - Mixed citations here, not sure whether these numbers are from Texas Water Development Board or Techie + Gamers. Also they project an increase from ~232 million gallons/year in 2024 to 49 billion in 2025? That's a 200x increase. And they expect a further ~8x increase from 2025 to 2030 to 400 billion? Or is it because the original number was only for Central Texas?
- 7% of what? The 2025 number or the 2030 number?
- Again subtle contradictions with TechieGamer which says "a white paper submitted to the Texas Water Development Board projected that data centers in the state will consume 49 billion gallons of water in 2025. That number is expected to rise to 399 billion gallons by 2030, nearly 7% of the state’s total projected water use.". So it's not the Texas Water Development Board but a whitepaper submitted to the board? Not sure who made these numbers now.
5. "Much of the water these centers use evaporates during cooling and can’t be recycled, a critical issue in an area already grappling with scarce water resources, as reported by Techie + Gamers."
- Again really want more info/numbers on this.
The root article seems to be from "The Austin Chronicle" :
1. This starts with "After Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s public breakup, Sam Altman replaced Musk as the president’s new favorite tech guy. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has become something like Musk’s archnemesis on the rapidly developing stage of artificial intelligence in Texas." This doesn't seem accurate with my reading of the news, and is so colourful that it makes me question the journalistic quality of this article.
2. The reporting across the three sources is mixed on who they're blaming. Economic Times doesn't even mention OpenAI and calls it "Microsoft's Stargate campus". Techi Gamers uses this phrase, but also later says "Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI". And The Austin Chronicle doesn't mention Microsoft at all and focuses on OpenAI. And the Wikipedia page for Stargate says "joint venture created by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and investment firm MGX." ?
3. I take it back reading it further this article is _significantly_ better than the others, with many more reputable sources.
4. Finally we get some real sources!! The 49 billion 2025 and 400 billion 2030 numbers are from HARC, Houston Advanced Research Center. And the 7% is actually 6.6%, and relative to the 2030 projection.
5. Finally real info on evaporation!! Still no numbers but we get a description of the process:
> Most data centers use an evaporative cooling system, in which the servers’ heat is absorbed by water. The heat is then removed from the water through evaporation, causing the water to be lost as vapor in the air. The cooler water then goes back through the machines, and this loop is regularly topped off with fresh water. After all, evaporation renders the water saltier and unusable after four or five cycles. “Then they dump the water, and it goes down the sewer,” Mace said.
> ...
> The Abilene Stargate campus will reportedly use a closed-loop, non-evaporative liquid cooling system that requires an initial refill of around 1 million gallons of water, with “minor” maintenance refills. Cook is skeptical that such closed-loop systems will use as little water as they suggest. It’s not possible, Cook says, to use the same water over and over again, recycled infinitely, to cool servers.
6. This article doesn't mention the 463 mil anywhere, which makes me think that was original research from TechiGamers. They reference SAWS, San Antonio Water System, but again the numbers are without context, so would need to do some original research to get any meaningful insights from these numbers.
If I can tell something is "vibe coded", that means it's bad. It doesn't matter what tools people use as long as the output is good. Vibe coding smells include:
1. Tons of pointless comments outlining trivial low-level behaviour,
2. No understanding of abstraction levels,
3. No real architecture at all,
4. Not DRY, no helper functions or inconsistent use of said functions across project,
5. Way too many lines of code.
None of these are shaming for use of any particular tool, they are just shaming the output.
Ok, let's better not talk about "vibe coding" because we don't really have definition of what it means. "Historically" it means "just letting the AI code without looking at its output" while I often see people that are more diligently using AI using it kind of tongue in cheek. My mistake using the expression in the latter way.
>Right now on HN it almost seems like "AI shaming" at work.
HN leans "old school". It's the Angry Nerd trope; Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
The people doing "AI shaming" or claiming that "AI doesn't work" are going to have their lunch eaten.
> "AI doesn't work" are going to have their lunch eaten.
Please, stop it. AI doesn't work for every use case, and when it "works" it fails to stay up to the exaggerated hype. People with deep knowledge and experience will eat their lunch. LLMs knowledge is stale as soon as a new version comes out and no rag hallucinate too. It's a tool and a tool doesn't have appetite
Thanks! Although I had to use it for some things (like the logo, for example, and I’m not a "graphic guy"), in the end, since it’s a simple project by design, I didn’t mind, and the result isn’t bad at all.
It's really odd now that we look for more human code rather than AI Generated code, and I think this is going to be increasing in every form of data that's out there.
Genuinely why do you care?
Because we are a forum of craftspeople. The Show HN system is a good faith system for showing something that you built and can presumably engage with us about what you built.
We want to engage with the person who engineered the thing, not someone who is just going to pipe our feedback into an LLM and see what pops out.
Just like I'd consider it deceptive if it turned out that HN populated the comments with an LLM. I want to engage with humans using their own brain.
That said, I would also consider it acceptable if you mentioned that your Show HN was vibe-coded if it were. But consider the vibe shift (pun) that would happen. We'd be curious about your vibe-code workflow and the experience of vibe-coding it if it was impressive, not necessarily curious about the thing the LLM built because that part isn't necessarily interesting anymore.
Finally, it's inevitable that these lines will quickly blur over time as AI becomes increasingly centerpiece in our lives. But in this transitionary phase so far, it kinda feels like you've been actually playing on a bot server in Quake 3 when you catch yourself admiring something that you thought the OP made: it's not rewarding to realize you're just stomping bots that you thought were human.
This may not be entirely the right metaphor but I kinda see it as the difference between fast food, a top rated restaurant, and home made cooking —with fast food being AI.
Generic, does the job, not the highest quality, bleak, fast repetitious output
While I agree, because I like writing code, I do wonder if this is how assembly writers felt when automated compilation started to take off.
I don't want to be Captain Obvious, but it wasn't like there was a long era of assembly computing, and then it was stopped being used as higher-level languages took over.
To put thing in perspective, Fortran was invented in 1954, Lisp 4 years later. In the following decades, the assembly language was being used along in various ways. And it is still being used in certain applications.
Yeah, I wasn't saying anything things suddenly dying out.
It literally doesn't matter, if your product sucks. Only end result for the user matters.
It matters to me. If it doesn't matter to you? That's fine and you are fully entitled to that view.
Asking tech people not to care more about the software they use than the average person seems pointless though.
>not the highest quality
I bet AI writes better code than 80% of developers out there.
But all developers think they are in the 20%.
Please provide github topics (tags) for the project. It may boost your project discoverability. I often use it with github search to find interesting projects in "topic".
Done. Thanks!
> There are several Pixel Art Editors that do the same things and even much more, but many require an account registration or the insertion of an e-mail or have a certain business model.
https://libresprite.github.io/
Latest Aseprite is still available with free (as in beer) source code to compile, even if it is a bit heavy on the dependencies these days, including requiring that you install a special fork of Skia iirc. I paid for it to get the pre-compiled binaries for Windows, but on Linux and OSX I always compiled it myself anyway. On FreeBSD, that is my desktop OS of choice now, I use the ancient open source version of Aseprite since that is what is most convenient to install (from the port). Maybe I should try Libresprite instead.
For my programmer art I also use old (Autodesk) Animator (in DOSBox) a lot. It is small and runs anywhere. Perfect for doodling on my phone, with some configuration to add various on-screen buttons in DOSBox. Small enough (less than 1 MB) that the entire application plus all configuration and saved working files can go into every source code repository where I want to edit some pixel art. https://github.com/AnimatorPro
Also have VGA Paint 386 installed in DOSBox everywhere. Have not used it much, but it seems good (probably more interesting for those that want something closer to a Deluxe Paint clone). https://www.bttr-software.de/products/vp386/
Then there is https://orama-interactive.itch.io/pixelorama that is open source and seems to improve at a good pace. I just never took the time to look very close.
Going to have a look at Tilf as well, to see if it is not too much work to get it to run in FreeBSD. Not being an expert in drawing anything, it helps to have many tools and switch between, as all tend to have something they do better (or easier) than the other ones.
> Going to have a look at Tilf as well, to see if it is not too much work to get it to run in FreeBSD
It should work without any issues, as long as there’s a Python interpreter you can definitely run it. If needed, let me know and I’ll try to work on it. I have plenty of other ideas to implement as well.
I'll throw my favourite into the ring, mtPaint: https://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/
Looks very nice, too bad no macOS :(
Awesome program OP, I downloaded it on my Mac and it Just Works(TM).
One helpful feature would be to shift an entire row/column of pixels down X rows/columns. Perhaps if I get time I'll submit a PR for it.
Thank you, and thanks for the suggestion. I’m open to any changes or proposals that might help improve this project, so I’ll gladly accept them!
The Pencil appears to put down the foreground color, the Eraser appears to clear to the background color.
Working at the pixel level, it is extremely useful to be able to "toggle" a pixel without switching tools. MacPaint (for example) would use the foreground color if you click on a pixel whose color is not the foreground color. If you start your Pencil drawing (click) on a pixel that is the foreground color, the Pencil draws with the background color instead.
Also, a modifier (like the Option key), is a nice way to also specify the background color for the pencil (regardless of the initial pixel clicked on).
I think I've implemented it correctly (if I got it right): https://github.com/danterolle/tilf/commit/f7ef6d2fa37b5659fb...
Thanks again!
These seem like great suggestions. I think I’ll implement them! Thank you so much!
Actually, I'm not referring to you but if all these suggestions were opened as issues, it would be easier for me to write a "thank you note" for each one lol
Sorry. Too lazy to open an issue. But also, thanks are not necessary. :-)
I like that it really is simply built and packaged, I'm sure it was fun to hack away at. There's something about gluing together a million packages which sucks the fun out of tinkering (for me, at least).
That’s also why the project was built from scratch. The only real dependency of the project is PySide6. The icons don’t come from any package. PyInstaller is used solely for bundling purposes. As outlined in the README.md, running Tilf requires nothing more than an installed version of Python (3).
Why, of all names possible, you thought TILF was the best one?
There’s no specific reason, I just liked the idea of a little elf/goblin having the freedom to draw whatever they wanted. At first, I wanted to call this project "Folletto" (in Italian, that means elf), but then I thought it would be better to keep an extremely simple name: a tiny elf who picks up his pencil and starts drawing. Tiny Elf.
Tile I’d Like to Fill.
It’s “Tilf” not TILF, and means Tiny Elf, per the docs.
Why? What’s the problem with it?
Milf, dilf, etc
I did not make the association. Is something wrong with me?
Wait till you see the image editor named after a kind of BDSM bottom.
I'm a big fan of software/services with silly, often sexually adjacent names. Take this for example: https://vore.website
Any guesses what this is? Spoiler: it's an RSS reader.
Great project!
I have one very silly question... Why is the elf logo not pixel art? :)
I’m not a graphic designer guy, I wouldn’t know where to start, but maybe in the future I could use Tilf to draw the logo! My highest artistic expression, for now, will probably be redrawing some Earthbound characters to experiment with SDL3.
Much "an app can be a home-cooked meal" energy here. Write a program to scratch an itch. Good to see that spirit still alive.
I share this sentiment. I like that OP is not afraid to say that the code quality might be not the best. In the end, for projects that are made for fun and out of curiosity, it doesn't matter that much (at least in the early stages).
If it becomes popular though, you can always just refactor and improve the important parts.
Thank you!
Congratulations!
What made you decide to go with PySlide6?
I already have some experience with Python/PySide6, and I was mainly interested in having a working prototype as soon as possible (I’m experimenting with SDL3 and animating squares isn’t exactly thrilling!). Plus, Qt widgets integrate very well with Python, it is so easy to create a section, especially when the documentation is well written, that helps a lot. Also, with PyInstaller, the build process for each platform is fairly straightforward (although for customized icons, there are a few extra steps to take).
There are some downsides of course (like the bundle size, for example), but that's not a problem, the core idea is: double-click on Tilf and start drawing right away.
why not just the default tk widgets, might be much less of external dependencies?
I simply never used it, nor did I ever feel the need. I moved on from Tkinter to PySide6.
PySide6 is a solid choice for Python desktop apps - Qt's rendering capabilities make it ideal for pixel-perfect graphics manipulation while avoiding the performance issues that can plague Tkinter or the dependency complexities of wxPython.
Hehe no ai
I recently discovered and have been fairly happy with PixelLab - an AI pixel art generator. I feel like they have a ways to go in features and UX, but it shows promise.