I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to draw (with 9front)

v1, 2026-07-09

The penultimate paper on paint(1) and the 9front art machine.

0 Questions. 1 How to draw 1.1 The Machine 1.1.1 A Computer 1.1.2 Two in One 1.2 The Input 1.2.1 Mouse 1.2.2 Finger 1.2.3 Tablet 1.2.4 Keyboard 1.2.5 Drawterm / VNC 1.3 The Medium 2 paint(1) 2.1 Getting Startled 2.1.1 Pen and Mouse 2.1.2 What paint(1) cannot do for you 2.1.3 paint(1) Keys 2.2 Canvas 2.2.1 Treat the initial window size of paint(1) as your canvas 2.3 Tools 2.3.1 Colors 2.3.2 Brush 2.3.3 Fill 2.3.4 Eraser 2.3.5 Straight Line 2.3.6 Circle 2.3.7 Pan 2.3.8 Zoom 2.3.9 Undo 2.3.10 Reset 2.4 Faux Layers 3 Image Operations 3.1 page(1) 3.1.1 Viewport 3.2

vcrop(1), crop(1) 3.3 resize(1) 3.4 rotate(1) 3.5 Specific Canvas Size 3.5.1 Crop Mathematics 3.5.2 Extra Margin 3.5.3 Extra Margin 3.6 Faux Layers: Slight Return 3.7 Tracers Work Both Ways 3.8 Palettes 4 Get it out! 4.1 Conversion 4.2 Stop 9front 5 EOF 5.1 Special Thanks 5.2 Resources

0 Questions.

What is How to draw? This is a document that will teach you how to be just like me, drawing on computers running an operating system you know nothing about.

Who might How to draw appeal to?

perverts robots witches

Who will How to draw not appeal to?

artists atheists iconoclasts

Why has How to draw been submitted to OCC 2026? My 9front art machine is an old computer. It was used to create this document and most of the visual attachments.

What's the tl;dr version of How to draw? Click and drag.

How to get started with 9front?

Go here Read the book

Before you scroll any further, it is strongly recommended that you first read Free Carrots #8: How to draw to familiarize yourself with the history and philosophy of drawing, and hardware and software options you might want to explore.

With that out of the way, this is:

1 How to draw

To draw you need two things. Something to draw with and something to draw on. The natural inclination might be to use a real device that you can touch with a pen and produce lines, but there are worse and less convenient ways to draw with 9front that you might prefer. While this document is written with a computer one can draw on in mind, most of it is applicable to any of the input methods below.

Maybe you can think of new ones.

1.1 The Machine 1.1.1 A Computer If you don't care about drawing on screens, you can learn How to draw on any computer running 9front.

1.1.2 Two in One

All in one. Canvas and brush - perhaps the ideal choice for those who like to draw on paper. Wacomized laptops with pens. Crack the screen open and draw on it. Here is a list of devices proven to work well for the purposes of How to draw:

ThinkPad X41t Thinkpad X60t, X61t ThinkPad X380 Yoga ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga

There's probably a million other 2in1 9front art machines that work well, you just have to find them, and preferably tell someone you did.

1.2 The Input 1.2.1 Mouse Mouse drawing is a very old technique. Favored for its compatibility with any computer that has a mouse.

1.2.2 Finger Touching the screen emulates left mouse clicks. There's no way to emulate any other, so a mouse needs to be kept nearby. Some people's entire gimmick depends on the fact that they finger paint their art. If you have a device that allows it, you can finger paint with 9front.

1.2.3 Tablet

External tablets with screens will (probably) not work with 9front.

External tablets without screens might work. Similarly to 2in1 drawing computers, external tablet pens with buttons can potentially simulate all three mouse clicks. I've seen it.

Of the three tablets that I personally tried, the one to recommend is GAOMON S620

Bought specifically for 9front, I ended up drawing the bulk of early Techno-Mage with it in OpenBSD. It still works great in 9front. Plug n play. Not so much in OpenBSD anymore.

The other two:

Acts like a touchpad (relative positioning) Wacom CTL-672 Does not work Wacom CTL-490

Some more information on tablets: [fqa] 3.2.4 - Tablet Digitizers

1.2.4 Keyboard You can't really draw with a keyboard (though you can write pictures), but you can't get away without using it either. For tablet computers, inaccessible physical keyboards, and other obscure setups, there is bitsy/keyboard, an on-screen keyboard. It has to be started through rio with the -k option:

% rio -k 'bitsy/keyboard -n'

1.2.5 Drawterm / vnc Drawterm into a distant and/or virtual 9front computer, use any of the aforementioned methods and devices, and a million more. You'll probably have a bad time, but the size of your tool box will grow drastically. You could finger paint with 9front from your Android telephone, mouse draw from any Linux and MacOS, use all the input devices that don't work with 9front from Windows,... Any combination of these will impress your hypothetical employer.

drawterm.9front.org

1.3 The Medium All image operations, drawing, cropping,... are performed on files in 9front's internal image(6) format. This is the default for everything this document works with. For producing pictures this is irrelevant and you never have to think about it. It is only after you want to share your creation with the wider world that you will want to convert it to a different format.

I usually name my 9front picture files file.pic. You can call them whatever you want.

2 paint(1)

While there is a fairly large selection of drawing software for 9front, this document concerns itself with paint(1) only, the original 9front drawing program. Not many know where it came from. Some say it manifested itself out of nowhere. Some blame cinap. Whatever the myth of origin, today paint(1) is known as one of the 7 princes of hell.

2.1 Getting Startled Forget what you know about digital art.

Forget what you know about drawing.

As you read on, you will realize that working with paint(1) is much closer to drawing with physical paper, ink, and colors than any other digital drawing program. It's like analog art, but not really.

Like with everything, it is advised you read the documentation of the programs mentioned in this paper. The functions and options listed and described here aim to explain to the reader How to draw, they only cover what is potentially useful for achieving that goal.

2.1.1 Pen and Mouse Tablet and computer pens and their buttons only simulate mouse inputs. This document will only reference mouse operations. It is up to you to learn how these are performed with your pen.

Hovering about simulates mouse movement, touching the surface simulates a left mouse click (or hold). In the ideal world a pen has two extra buttons. One for middle click, one for right click. In the less than ideal world, one of the buttons emulates either middle or right click, and the other button puts the pen into a different device mode (this is usually used for mapping the button to a different tool) - in 9front, this might not do anything, or it might emulate the third otherwise missing mouse click. Your mileage may vary.

If your pen only has one working button that emulates right click, you can simulate middle mouse click by holding shift and then holding the pen button. As an example, you will erase when holding the button, you will pan around when holding shift with the button.

For the most part, you will want to keep both keyboard and mouse nearby to perform the operations your pen cannot. If your pen can simulate all three mouse clicks, you may be satisfied with just a virtual keyboard (1.2.4) when using paint(1).

2.1.2 What paint(1) cannot do for you No pressure sensitivity: paint(1) and 9front in general have no support for it. Yet.

No layers, no cut-n-paste: what you draw is what you get. This limitation and potential alleviation is explored below (2.4). You will benefit from approaching paint(1) as if it were a piece of paper.

2.1.3 paint(1) Keys Save your picture: w - write file - press w and type the file name you want your picture saved as. Next time you press w, the last file name you put in will already be shown. To write repeatedly into the same file just press w and Enter. Do this often. Once you've saved your picture to a file, you can open it in page(1) or perform other image operations on it.

Open a picture: r - read file - press r and type the file name of a picture you want to open or reload. Like with w, once you read a file once, the file name will be shown in the prompt. r is useful for performing external image operations on the file you're currently drawing, and then reloading the modified file in paint(1).

Transform: | - transform the canvas by piping it through a command. The only time I use it is with rotate(1). | rotate -u

Redirection: < command - perform some operation on a file and read it in paint(1). This will replace whatever currently exists on your canvas. Open file glenda.pic with a 50 pixel black border < crop -i -50 glenda.pic Open file glenda.pic (same as r, but does not replace the filename in the w/r prompt) < cat glenda.pic

Redirection: > command - perform some operation on the current canvas and write it to a file. Add a 50 pixel black border to the current canvas, rotate it by 90 degrees and write (save) it to file modified_glenda.pic > crop -i -50 | rotate -r 90 > modified_glenda.pic

Make a backup of the current file. This will not change the pre-filled file name in w > cat > backup_glenda.pic

2.2 Canvas In paint(1)'s context, the word canvas is understood as the area (a rectangle) that contains your drawing.

When you start paint(1) you are greeted by a white window and a toolbar. Even though you won't be able to tell, you can pan around the endless white in any direction for all eternity. This is what an empty file looks like.