termDRAW

termDRAW is an open-source, agent-friendly ASCII illustrator for the terminal, built by Ben Vinegar and licensed under MIT. It lets developers create editable diagrams, UI mocks, and text graphics entirely within a terminal environment, outputting plain text rather than SVG or bitmap graphics. The project is written in TypeScript, requires Bun 1.3+, and is actively maintained on GitHub.

What It Is

termDRAW is a terminal-native drawing editor that fills the gap between heavyweight diagramming tools and quick ASCII sketches. It operates as an interactive, mouse-supported TUI (terminal user interface) application where users draw shapes and text, then export the result as plain text, fenced Markdown code blocks, or native .td.json documents that can be reopened and edited later. The tool is explicitly described as "agent-friendly," meaning it is designed to work well in AI-assisted and automated developer workflows.

Package Architecture

termDRAW ships as a monorepo with three distinct packages:

• @termdraw/app — the standalone CLI tool, installed globally and invoked with the termdraw command
• @termdraw/opentui — embeddable React-style components built on OpenTUI, allowing termDRAW to be embedded inside other terminal applications
• @termdraw/pi — a Pi package that opens termDRAW as an overlay inside the Pi environment

This modular design means the drawing engine can be used as a library, not just a standalone tool.

CLI Workflow

After installing via npm install --global @termdraw/app, users launch the editor with termdraw. Key workflow steps include:

• Draw interactively using mouse support in a compatible terminal
• Press Enter or Ctrl+S to export rendered art to stdout
• Press Ctrl+D to save the editable .td.json diagram file
• Use --load to reopen an existing diagram for further editing
• Use --output to write rendered art directly to a file
• Use --fenced to export a Markdown-fenced code block

The native .td.json format preserves object metadata for re-editing; plain-text export is a one-way render.

Embedding in OpenTUI Apps

The @termdraw/opentui package exposes React-compatible components (TermDrawApp, TermDrawEditor, TermDraw) and renderables for embedding the drawing canvas inside custom terminal applications. Developers can wire up onSave, onSaveDiagram, and onCancel callbacks, pass an initialDocument, and control layout with width/height props — making it composable within larger TUI projects built on @opentui/core and @opentui/react.

Update: v0.4.1

The latest release is v0.4.1, published in May 2026. The repository was created in April 2026 and has seen active development, accumulating 299 stars and 11 forks on GitHub as of late August 2026. The project has 8 open issues and CI is tracked via GitHub Actions on the main branch, signaling an actively maintained early-stage open-source tool.