Re: [9front] Blie - blended layers image editor

[sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de>]

11.08.2024 20:50:22 sl@stanleylieber.com:
> paint(1) has some nice design choices. following programs like sam
> and acme, you can do things like this:
>
>           <command
>                Executes command and reads the canvas from its standard
>                output.
>
>           >command
>                Executes command and writes the canvas to its standard
>                input.
>
>           |command
>                Transforms the canvas by piping it through command.
>
> this allows a lot of features to be towed outside the layer-compositing
> program entirely, and any such tools can also be reused for other
> applications.

Yes, exactly.

In blie, that should be easily doable as an effect/pipe layer, which would be a separate layer type that doesn't have any bitmap data itself, but pipes the image through any command (or commands) you'd like, for example a bloom filter.

The bonus would be that this is non-destructive, so you can adjust the base layers and still get the same effect added on it. You can also move that layer around, which changes the image, but you don't lose any data.

That's also the idea behind farbfeld (if you want to look at it): have an image format that's as simple as possible so you can send the data in a pipe. Farbfeld is not primarily designed as a storage format, more like an intermediate format: png2ff <src.png | filterA | filterB | ff2png >dst.png. (I don't plan to add farbfeld support as it's not a plan 9 thing. I built some ff to plan 9 image converter a while ago though.)

sirjofri