Shader IDE

Bonzomatic

Pixel shaders are amazing. They're perhaps the closest modern technology we have to the custom graphics processors and coprocessors found in many of those 1980s home computers. Shaders came to life as self-contained functions that helped 3D surfaces look better, such as the simplistic Phong or Gouraud shading you might be familiar with from the original Blender. Pixel shaders are also distinct from the ray tracing or light casting that goes into building a scene, because, as their name describes, they operate on the final pixel, dynamically changing their color according to their position within the environment. This is why most are considered post-processing effects that can be applied to any scene or game after the main artwork has been added.

Rather than shaders being calculated by your CPU, they have become discrete units in a GPU where they are programmed directly from OpenGL using a special shader interpreter language called GLSL. But because they're self-contained, they're relatively easy to hack on – some applications and games will even import raw GLSL from a configuration file. But what you really need is a system that lets you write GLSL while seeing the results instantaneously, and that's what Bonzomatic does. Bonzomatic is a simple command-line text editor that runs in full screen mode and gives you almost immediate feedback on your GLSL tinkering. It's ideal for people who know nothing about shaders and want to experiment, as well as for developers who want to tweak the best possible output and performance from every byte of code. Bonzomatic lets you quickly experiment and compile your shaders, with the effects shown in the background and across the editing environment unless you disable them with the F11 key. It's even been used as the platform for coding challenges, and it's a genuinely fun way to play with code you may have found online or when trying to learn how shaders work.

Project Website

https://github.com/Gargaj/Bonzomatic

After pressing F5 to recompile a shader (instantly), its effects are rendered across the background of the editing environment.

Pipe command helper