8×8 tile and sprite editing
Use pixel, flood-fill, and line tools for background tiles and transparent sprite images. Colour index 0 acts as transparency in sprite mode.
Game Boy Color-style indexed art
Build tiny worlds with palette-powered pixels.
P1Xel Editor is a compact Zig application for 8×8 tiles, sprites, palettes, and maps. Paint with palette indices, swap biome banks, and watch entire scenes recolour without rewriting pixel data.
Editor capabilities
Everything needed for constrained retro art.
Designed around a focused hardware-style workflow: tiny images, four-colour palettes, shared tile IDs, and map banks that can target different biome palette sets.
Indexed palette banks
Four biome banks, each with eight palettes of four colours. Update a colour slot once and every indexed pixel using it updates instantly.
Map editor built in
Stamp tiles, fill regions, place sprites, apply palette overrides and flips, pan, zoom, and resize maps across four independent map banks.
Indexed editing model
Pixels store numbers, palettes supply colour.
Each 8×8 image stores 64 values from 0 to
3, plus a palette ID from 0 to
7. The active biome bank decides what those
indices look like on screen.
That separation makes it natural to reuse tile art across grasslands, deserts, night variants, or any other palette theme while keeping map and sprite data compact.
Grassland
Desert
Production flow
From tile shape to playable map.
The editor keeps reusable art, palette themes, and map placement connected while preserving the constraints that make retro assets practical.
Draw reusable tiles
Start in the tiles screen and paint 8×8 background art with primary and secondary indexed colours.
Swap biome palettes
Preview the same shared tile base against grassland, desert, or custom four-colour palette banks.
Create sprites
Switch to sprite mode for transparent character, item, and object art using the same compact bank model.
Compose maps
Stamp backgrounds, fill cells, place sprites, and store palette/flip attributes per map cell or sprite instance.
Screenshots
A compact native editor interface.
P1Xel Editor runs as a native Zig application with a
pixel-focused UI, splash screen, top navigation, and a
persistent project file called
art_data.p1x.
Current project limits
Small by design.
Tile and sprite image size.
Colours per palette and palette banks.
Palettes per biome bank.
Maximum images per tile or sprite bank.
Ready-to-run builds
Download P1Xel Editor.
Grab the native binary for your platform. The executable is deliberately tiny and fits easily on a single floppy disk. Linux users may need to mark the file executable before running it.
Linux x86_64
Native Linux build for 64-bit desktop systems. Requires the runtime libraries used by the Zig/X11 build.
p1xel-editor-linux-x86_64
Windows x86_64
Recommended Windows build for modern 64-bit PCs. Download and run the executable directly.
p1xel-editor-windows-x86_64.exe
Windows x86
Compatibility build for older 32-bit Windows systems that cannot run the 64-bit executable.
p1xel-editor-windows-x86.exe
Portable projects
Move your art with one file.
P1Xel Editor stores the current project as
art_data.p1x. To move a project to
another computer, copy that file next to the P1Xel
Editor executable on the target machine, then launch
the editor.
If art_data.p1x is missing or cannot be
loaded, the editor starts from its built-in default
project data. Save regularly to write your current
palettes, tiles, sprites, visible slots, and map
banks back into the project file.
# On the source computer
copy art_data.p1x
# On the target computer
place art_data.p1x beside the editor binary
run P1Xel EditorBuild from source
Build P1Xel Editor from source.
Install Zig, then build or run from the project root. Linux builds require X11 and ALSA development libraries; release helper targets use UPX.
git clone https://github.com/w84death/p1xel-editor.git
cd p1xel-editor
zig build
zig build run
# Release helper targets
zig build release-linux
zig build release-windows