Command-line tool for creating simple drawings

Question

I am looking for a command-line tool for creating simple drawings on macOS. I usually need to draw some (very) simple figures/symbols. Drawing them with GUI apps like GIMP is somewhat an overkill, and I want to do it inside the terminal anyway.

The tool I am looking for can be a shell or a program. As an example, suppose I want to draw a "play" button (something like a flattened YouTube icon), I would expect something like an interpreter of:

color 255 0 0
rect 0 0 100 100
color 255 255 255
poly [10 10 10 90 90 50]

or a command like:

draw -c red -r 0 0 100 100 -c white -p 10 10 10 90 90 50

It is fine as long as I can draw elementary geometric shapes (lines, polygons and circles) and texts. Transparency support is a plus. Advanced features like layers are not necessary. A Linux port followed by a self-compilation is also fine. The software should be released under an open-source license.

Note: I am not looking for an obscure programming language interpreter (such as Braindraw). I also expect it to be fast, at least faster than transforming the above script into a valid Java program, then wait for compilation and run it. Also, I want a loseless output. Something like PNG or even BMP is OK. SVG isn't, though, because I need further format conversions.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use imagemagick. It has a command line tool, GUIs also available.

Drawing a rectangle can be done like this

convert logo: -fill none -stroke black -strokewidth 3 -draw "rectangle 10,10 630,470" logo_rect.png

https://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php

Answer 2

Probably the oldest and most widely used is Graphviz Dot (search this site for questions tagged/answered thereby, for instance, this answer of mine).

This:

graph {  
           a -- b;   
           b -- c;   
           a -- c;   
           d -- c;   
           e -- c;   
           e -- a;   
      } 

draws this:

For colo(u)red fill, see https://graphviz.gitlab.io/_pages/Gallery/directed/crazy.html

Look at the gallery for arrows, shapes, everything that you could wish for.

Answer 3

For 3D shapes, https://www.allwinedesigns.com/blog/stlcmd is notable.

It can draw cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, toruses, threads (the goal was to provide a tool for 3D printing). There's a transform tool which can scale uniformly and also along any angle. Another tool will do intersections, union and differences.

The output is in STL format, http://jinjunho.github.io/Madeleine.js/ provides an open source, all JavaScript renderer for them.