Standard Graphics (abbreviated as stdg) is a command-line tool for printing 2D graphics from any language to any screen. It uses stdin and stdout to make 2D graphics as simple as printing commands with Python's print() or Java's System.out.println() for example. You can even write plain text and handle user interaction.

You only need to learn stdg once. Then it will no longer matter what language or frameworks you happen to be using. You will always be able to easily print 2D graphics using the same easy-to-remember commands.

Features

• Learn once - stdg provides a minimal set of commands for 2D graphics. These commands are designed to be intuitive, easy-to-learn, and easy-to-remember. They are mostly inspired by Khan Academy's computer programming environment and Processing.
• Use anywhere - stdg is both cross-language and cross-platform. This means that you can freely switch between programming languages and operating systems without having to learn a totally new 2D graphics library for the language/OS.
• Get fast, performant graphics - stdg is an abstraction over MiniFB and Raqote which are both implemented entirely in Rust (except for MacOS which uses some Objective-C). Therefore, your graphics will be rendered at effectively native speed. There is no use of an Electron-like framework or "dynamic" languages in the rendering, event-handling.

Example

Standard Graphics can be used with plain text. As an example, you could save the following to a text file, rectangle.txt.

start 400 400 Untitled

background 255 255 255
fill 255 0 0
rect 50 50 100 100

present forever

If you have stdg and python correctly installed, you can open a terminal (command line/prompt), navigate to the folder containing rectangle.txt by using cd, type out the following, and press enter.

rectangle.txt | stdg

This is what you should see.

Standard Graphics enables you to do even more complex things. This next example is taken from Khan Academy's "Making animations" lesson. Since this program is written in Python, you will have to use the Python interpreter to run it.

print("start 400 400 Untitled")


# position of the car
x = 10

while True:
  print("background 151 244 247")

  # draw the car body
  print("fill 255 0 115")
  print("nostroke")
  print("rect " + str(x) + " 200 100 20")
  print("rect " + str(x + 15) + " 178 70 40")

  # draw the wheels
  print("fill 77 66 66")
  print("circle " + str(x + 25) + " 221 12")
  print("circle " + str(x + 75) + " 221 12")

  print("present") # this is what actually says to draw, must be in an infinite loop

  x = x + 1

Enter the following in a terminal.

python moving_car.py | stdg

You should see the following pop up as a window.

Read on the see how you can use stdg for not only simple graphics and animations but also interactive user interfaces.

Built with Standard Graphics

Standard Graphics has been used by open-source projects.

• Testing experimental programming languages

Usage

There are 2 ways of using Standard Graphics.

The first, and simplest, is by simply piping your program's output to stdg. All of your program's output (stuff that would normally be printed) will be sent to stdg. You can open a terminal and type in something like the following, provided stdg is installed.

my_data.csv | ruby my_program.rb | stdg

For each line of input that stdg recieves, it will check if the first word (first token in line split by whitespace) matches a command. If the word matches, it will look at the rest of the line and execute the command by printing a rectangle, or setting color, etc.. If the word doesn't match, it will just print the line out.

The second way is by giving stdg a process to run.

stdg node my_thing.js | settings.csv

In this case, stdg doesn't accept any input. You can't pipe anything to it. You can't interactively type stuff in the terminal. You can, however, give it a process to run.

You give it a process by providing arguments to stdg. These arguments get parsed into a single command that can be executed as a process. Basically you can write stdg python options.py or stdg ./menu but you can't do stdg python options.py && ./menu.

Then, stdg will run your process and read its output in exactly the same way the first usage has stdg reading. Commands get interpreted. Everything else gets printed as output. But now in addition to that, stdg will also sometimes print input to the process itself. This input will be information regarding things like mouse position, mouse click, etc.. The process can read this input one line at a time to get the mouse/key/etc. information.

This second way of using stdg allows for interactivity. You can do things like this-

print("start 400 400 A Rectangle")

while True:
  print("background 255 255 255")
  print("fill 255 0 0")
  
  print("get mousex")
  print("get mousey")
  print("rect " + str(float(input()) - 25.0) + " " + str(float(input()) - 25.0) + " 50.0 50.0")
  print("present")

Cheat Sheet

The following is a cheat sheet/reference for using stdg.

The following are commands for the most basic usage of stdg. Note that all whitespace in text like in start and text commands are converted to single spaces.

The following are useful for styling.

We can do transformations.

There are the common 2D primitives.

Last but not least, we have text and images.

And here are the keys supported by stdg-

• All numeric characters
• All lower-case alphabetic characters (use leftshift or rightshift to check for upper-case)
• up, down, left, right
• space, tab, enter
• leftshift, rightshift
• escape, backspace, delete

About

Standard Graphics is designed to be useful for many sorts of things-

• User interfaces for Bash scripts
• Visualization of Python-scripted simulations
• Visualization of data
• Desktop games written in JavaScript
• Simple vector graphics with plain text
• Simple animations with C
• and much more...

The software itself is written entirely in pure Rust with the only exception being the MacOS back-end. It uses Raquote and MiniFB behind the scenes for drawing stuff.

Getting Started

There are two ways to install Standard Graphics.

The first way is to download the binaries from here. Once downloaded, make sure that the folder location where the binaries are stored is added to PATH (look that up on the Internet if you aren't sure "how to add folder location to PATH". So basically what you would need to do is...

1. Download binary file (stdg.exe or stdg)
2. Move binary to desired folder (maybe Program Files\stdg\stdg.exe for example)
3. Add the desired folder to PATH.

The second way is to install Standard Graphics with cargo. Make sure you have installed Rust. Then, simply install as follows.

cargo install stdg

During installation, you may have to install a bunch of packages. On Windows, I was personally able to simply install and run. However, on Linux, I had to install at least libfontconfig1-dev, xcursor.

Once installed, you can take a look at the cheat sheet for more information on the various commands you can print.