The Shoebot IDE

For your first taste of Shoebot, try running the Shoebot IDE by typing the following in your terminal:

  shoebot-ide

From there, open the primitives.bot example (in the examples/ dir under the dir where you downloaded the sources, or in /usr/share/shoebot/examples). After it’s open, run it (Run->Run script). You can now try tweaking the script values and running it again to see how each command behaves.

Note: The Shoebot IDE is still in a testing phase and some things might break; please report all bugs or inconsistencies you find at the Shoebot bugtracker.

Shoebot from the console

Shoebot parses scripts written in the Nodebox/Drawbot language and creates image output from those instructions. Running Shoebot scripts through the console is rather straightforward:

  sbot <yourscript.bot> -o <outputfile>

If you forget the -o argument, it will output by default to file named “output.png”. You can specify the type of image through the output file extension:

.svg (Scalable Vector Graphics)
.ps (PostScript)
.pdf (Portable Document Format)
.png (Portable Network Graphics)

Shoebot will automagically generate the appropriate output from the extension you specify. For instance, if you want to output the primitives.bot example to an SVG file, you just have to type:

  sbot /usr/share/shoebot/examples/primitives.bot -o test.svg

This is Shoebot’s ‘oneshot mode’: it reads from the script and creates an image. However, there are some other nice features in Shoebot besides outputting static images. Read more on them: