monoline 0.5.0

Aesthetic drawing in your terminal — smooth braille strokes, shape correction, palettes, symmetry.

monoline

Aesthetic drawing in your terminal — smooth braille strokes, tldraw-style shape correction, curated palettes, symmetry, and a dot grid.

Freehand drawing with live smoothing — hold Ctrl and a rough circle snaps to a perfect one; symmetry mirrors strokes as you draw.

Install

pip install monoline    # or: pipx install monoline / uv tool install monoline

Quick start

monoline                    # start on a blank canvas
monoline drawing.mono.json  # open (or create) a named drawing

Click and drag with the mouse to draw. Hold Ctrl while dragging to snap the stroke to a line, circle, ellipse, or rectangle. Press ? any time for the in-app cheat sheet, c to clear, q to quit.

Keymap

Keys	Action
drag	draw
Ctrl+drag	snap to shape (line / circle / ellipse / rect)
d / e	pen / eraser
1-9	pick color
p / P	next / previous palette
s	cycle symmetry (off → vertical → horizontal → radial4)
g	toggle dot grid
u / Ctrl+Z	undo
r / Ctrl+Y	redo
Ctrl+S	save
x	export (.txt = ANSI, .svg = SVG)
i	import image, video, or 3D model (path prompt)
v	paste image from clipboard
Shift+drag	rotate and move a loaded 3D model
c	clear the canvas (asks to confirm)
?	this help overlay (escape or ? to close)
q	quit (asks to confirm if there are unsaved changes)

Import images and video

Drop any image or video file onto the terminal (or press i for a path prompt, v to paste one from the clipboard, or run monoline photo.png / monoline clip.mp4) and it becomes braille art you can draw over. Still images are Floyd-Steinberg dithered with 24-bit color per cell; videos and animated GIFs play back in braille in real time. A braille cell's eight dots share one color, so chroma resolution is per-cell: that's the medium, not a bug. Erasing over media hides its dots non-destructively; undo brings the import back.

Supported video formats: MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI, MKV, M4V, and animated GIF. On Linux, clipboard paste needs xclip (X11) or wl-clipboard (Wayland).

Import 3D models

Drop a 3D model onto the terminal (or press i and enter a path, or run monoline model.obj) to open it in a braille viewport with a ground grid and axes. The model renders as a shaded wireframe you can draw over.

Shift+drag with the mouse to rotate and move the model inside the viewport. Undo restores the previous pose or removes the import entirely.

Supported formats: OBJ, STL, GLB, GLTF, PLY, and OFF.

Drop an icosahedron (or any mesh), spin it with Shift+drag, then doodle over the wireframe — the ground grid shows the 3D viewport space.

Palettes

Cycle through with p / P, or set a default in the config file:

• tokyonight (default)
• catppuccin
• gruvbox
• nord
• pastel
• neon
• mono

Configuration

monoline reads a TOML config file on startup, creating it with defaults on first run:

• Linux: ~/.config/monoline/config.toml
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/monoline/config.toml
• Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\monoline\monoline\config.toml

# monoline configuration
shape_correct = "ctrl"   # ctrl | always | off
palette = "tokyonight"   # see the palette list above
smoothing = 0.5           # 0.0 - 1.0

• shape_correct — when Ctrl+drag snaps to a recognized shape. "ctrl" (default) snaps only while Ctrl is held; "always" snaps every stroke without needing Ctrl (useful if your terminal swallows Ctrl+drag); "off" disables shape recognition entirely.
• palette — the color palette to load on startup. Overridden automatically when opening a saved file that recorded a different palette.
• smoothing — how much Chaikin smoothing/resampling is applied to freehand strokes, from 0.0 (raw mouse samples) to 1.0 (maximally smoothed).

File formats

• .mono.json — monoline's native format: versioned JSON containing canvas size, background, palette, and every stroke. Fully reopenable and editable — this is what Ctrl+S saves.
• .txt (ANSI) — a plain-text export with embedded truecolor ANSI escape codes. cat it in any truecolor-capable terminal to see the drawing.
• .svg — a vector export of the strokes, suitable for viewing in a browser or editing in a vector graphics tool.

Pick the format by the extension you type when exporting with x.

Terminal support

monoline draws with Unicode braille characters and needs mouse reporting, so your terminal matters:

• Windows: use Windows Terminal. The legacy conhost.exe console does not support the mouse reporting monoline needs for drawing.
• Font: pick a braille-capable monospace font — Cascadia Code/Mono, any Nerd Font, or the default monospace font on macOS/Linux all work.
• Ctrl+drag not registering? Some terminal emulators swallow the Ctrl modifier on mouse drags. If shape snapping never triggers, set shape_correct = "always" (snap every stroke) or "off" (disable it) in your config file.

License

MIT