alt Hacker NewsLibreSprite – open-source pixel art editor
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Aseprite is absolutely worth paying for. I do game jams and it works really well.
And for emergencies, there is always DPaint JS!
Haven't used LibreSprite but Aseprite, from which it forked, has been an enormous boon to me, for pixel arting it definitely fits my habits and abilities much better than anything else I tried (GIMP, Krita, GrafX2, actual DPaint, Digipaint...).
The newest news post on this barebones site is from 2023, announcing the MacOS downloads. On the news page there's two other posts; the oldest one is from 2022, and talks about a complete rewrite of the code. I think this fork looks pretty dead.
I've used libresprite and generally think it's very nice, but I'd really recommend using GIMP or Krita over it for most pixel art, learning those is useful outside of pixel art
I actually paid for a license for Aseprite a few years ago. I'm not 100% sure why I did, other than "this seems neat".
I like it a lot. Pixel art is shockingly approachable and the animation stuff in Aseprite is pretty fun.
I still haven't tried LibreSprite, so I don't know if it's better.
Begging open source projects to stop with the libre<name> convention, it's awkward to say, it's cringe and seems to spiritually doom a project to fail.
I'll shill this project again: I built myself a small sprite generator because I'm a terrible artist.
If you're looking for pixel-art sprites, check out 8bitsmith.com. Or you can just ask Nano-Banana for sprite sheets and it does a pretty good job!
See also:
https://github.com/Orama-Interactive/Pixelorama
https://github.com/piskelapp/piskel
They're similar pixel art editor programs.
There's an experimental android version too which is more than aseprite offers. For the basics libresprite is a great entry into pixel art
What value is the license adding here? Sprite editors are never going to be enshittified, in fact I believe underfunding is more of a concern. I'd rather go with one that acknowledges this tension and promises sustainability like Aseprite, rather than one that undercuts that sustainability in favor of nominal openness.
I love the MS-DOS feel to it. Many graphical tools used to have such UI flavour.
Weird mouse acceleration when it is over canvas and is replaced by crosshair icon.
Tried to run it on macOS but it crashed on boot. Looks cool!
This looks like Aseprite. Aseprite is already open source and you can get it for free, all completely legal. The only caveat is that you need to compile it yourself (which takes 2-5 shell commands). I think this is more than fair, but ripping off Aseprite is not so much. Their license also strictly prohibits that behavior.