claudegoodies
Skill

pretext

From NousResearch

Use when building creative browser demos with @chenglou/pretext — DOM-free text layout for ASCII art, typographic flow around obstacles, text-as-geometry games, kinetic typography, and text-powered generative art. Produces single-file HTML demos by default.

Facts

Repository
NousResearch/hermes-agent
Status
Actively maintained
Last commit
Source file
skills/creative/pretext/SKILL.md

Source preview

The instructions Claude Code reads when this skill runs.

# Pretext Creative Demos

## Overview

[`@chenglou/pretext`](https://github.com/chenglou/pretext) is a 15KB zero-dependency TypeScript library by Cheng Lou (React core, ReasonML, Midjourney) for **DOM-free multiline text measurement and layout**. It does one thing: given `(text, font, width)`, return the line breaks, per-line widths, per-grapheme positions, and total height — all via canvas measurement, no reflow.

That sounds like plumbing. It is not. Because it is fast and geometric, it is a **creative primitive**: you can reflow paragraphs around a moving sprite at 60fps, build games whose level geometry is made of real words, drive ASCII logos through prose, shatter text into particles with exact per-grapheme starting positions, or pack shrink-wrapped multiline UI without any `getBoundingClientRect` thrash.

This skill exists so Hermes can make **cool demos** with it — the kind people post to X. See `pretext.cool` and `chenglou.me/pretext` for the community demo corpus.

## When to Use

Use when the user asks for:
- A "pretext demo" / "cool pretext thing" / "text-as-X"
- Text flowing around a moving shape (hero sections, editorial layouts, animated long-form pages)
- ASCII-art effects using **real words or prose**, not monospace rasters
- Games where the playfield / obstacles / bricks are made of text (Tetris-from-letters, Breakout-of-prose)
- Kinetic typography with per-gl
View full source on GitHub →

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