Rust and Qt 6 QML. A zero-copy wgpu/Vulkan canvas that never moves a pixel across the language boundary while you paint. A dense workspace shaped after Photoshop and drawn in the idiom of KDE Plasma 6.
Why PhotoTux
Compositing happens on the GPU and stays there. Document pixels are written by wgpu and presented by Qt's Vulkan RHI on the same device, so nothing crosses the language boundary while you pan, zoom or paint — a 4K document with a stack of layers moves at the refresh rate of the monitor, not the speed of a memcpy.
The tool shelf is on the left, the options bar under the menu bar, and Layers, Properties and History on the right. Menu entries sit under the menu they belong to. Nobody moving across should have to relearn where anything lives, so nothing has been rearranged to be tidier.
Spacing, control shapes, focus and hover treatment follow KDE Plasma 6, drawn from one token file rather than a second palette invented per panel. A dense editor that belongs on the desktop it runs on, instead of a web app wearing a title bar.
Features
No cloud, no telemetry, no sign-in. PhotoTux opens files on your disk and writes them back.
Every command in the editor also exists in the command palette (Ctrl Shift P) and as a rebindable action. The full list is in the tool reference.
Screenshots
Captured from a real build on Wayland. The image being edited is synthetic, so nothing here is a licence you would have to honour.
A document open with a text layer over a Vibrance adjustment over the photograph. The status bar carries the document size, zoom, active layer and the composite time for the last frame.
All 28 modes, banded by family — normal, darken, lighten, contrast, compare, component — so the list teaches the grouping rather than spelling it out.
Preview draws on the canvas without marking the document dirty. Nothing reaches the layer until Apply, and a stale preview is refused rather than committed.
The Layer menu, in Photoshop's order: New Layer, Duplicate, the merge family, groups, then the submenus for adjustments, shapes, smart objects, styles, align and masks.
Every action in the application, filterable, with its menu and its chord. The same registry drives the menus, the palette and the shortcut editor.
720p, 1080p, 2K and 4K presets with an editable size beside them. New documents open on an opaque white Background and zoom to fit.
Guides, grid and rulers; UI density, high-contrast chrome, reduced motion and a safe-start switch; history retention.
Under the hood
The core is portable and headless: the document, the command spine and the history know nothing about Qt or the GPU, which is why they can be tested without either.
| Crate | Owns | Stays free of |
|---|---|---|
| phototux_engine | Document, commands, history, session semantics | Qt, wgpu |
| phototux_ui | The qtbridge QObjects the QML shell binds to | wgpu |
| phototux_canvas | Qt ↔ wgpu interop and the thin C++ shim | Handwritten C++ beyond that shim |
| phototux_gpu | wgpu pipelines, shaders, compositing | Qt |
| phototux_io | .ptx, raster codecs, the PSD subset | Qt, wgpu |
| phototux | The binary and the ahead-of-time compiled QML module | Business logic |
The reasoning behind each boundary is recorded in the project's decision register — see DR-023 and DR-025 for the frozen stack and the crate topology.
Files
| Format | Open | Save | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| .ptx | Native layered document — layers, masks, smart-object sources | ||
| PSD | Layered subset, RGB 8-bit, with a compatibility report | ||
| PNG | Flattened, with alpha | ||
| JPEG | Flattened, quality 92 on export | ||
| WebP | Flattened | ||
| TIFF | Flattened | ||
| BMP | Flattened | ||
| GIF | First frame only |
ICC profiles can be embedded, assigned and converted, and a soft-proof view shows what a document will look like through a chosen output profile. Profile bytes are validated before they are written into a document.
Documents open when a session ends badly are written to a recovery store and offered back at the next launch. Autosave runs while you work and says so in the status area.
The container format and its versioning rules are documented in the format reference.
Install
There are no distribution packages yet — no AUR entry, no Flatpak, no AppImage. When there are, they will be listed here first.
sudo pacman -S --needed rust qt6-base qt6-declarative qt6-svg vulkan-icd-loader cmakesudo apt install qt6-base-dev qt6-declarative-dev qt6-svg-dev \
libvulkan-dev cmake build-essentialsudo dnf install qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtdeclarative-devel \
qt6-qtsvg-devel vulkan-loader-devel cmakegit clone https://github.com/PerkyZZ999/Phototux.git
cd Phototux
export PATH=/usr/lib/qt6/bin:$PATH
export QMAKE=/usr/lib/qt6/bin/qmake
cargo run --release -p phototuxThe PATH and QMAKE exports are not optional on any distribution that puts Qt 5's qmakefirst. The build links against whichever Qt that qmakereports, so getting it wrong produces a link error that looks like a missing symbol rather than a wrong Qt.
First launch opens New Document with 720p, 1080p, 2K and 4K presets. The tour of the workspace walks through where everything is, and the installation guide covers the cases this page does not.