What is contributist?

Contributist is a web tool that lets you paint custom pixel art directly onto your GitHub contribution graph. Instead of leaving your commit history as a random pattern, you use a drawing board to design a layout, load community presets like a running cat or pixel hearts, and then generate a script that creates the commit history needed to match your design. The main editor is a 2D canvas where you draw with paint and eraser tools, working across multiple layers that can include custom raster art, memes, background images, and text, each with its own visibility, ordering, and locking settings. There is a vibe mode focused purely on creative drawing, and an advanced mode that gives finer control over things like noise, weekend patterns, vacation gaps, and how dense the commits look. You can also import your existing contribution history from GitHub, GitLab, or Gitea and start painting on top of what is already there. Beyond the 2D grid, there is a 3D trophy mode that turns your contribution art into a 3D scene you can export for use in software like Blender, or even send to a local shop to have printed. Finished artwork can be exported as a PNG in a few color palettes for sharing on social media, or exported as a shareable URL that encodes the whole design so someone else can open it and see the same art immediately. To actually apply the commits, Contributist offers two modes for sending your design to git. In local dev mode, running the app on your own machine lets it generate and push the commits straight to your repository. In cloud mode, since the hosted version cannot touch your local files, it instead gives you a Bash or PowerShell script to download and run yourself. The project is built with Node.js, includes a hosted demo, and uses Vitest for its test suite. It is licensed under MIT, a permissive license that lets you reuse and modify the code freely.