Help wanted

One person built this far. It needs more.

Sloom Studio went from a node graph to a four-workspace suite in a year, written by a single developer. Releasing it as free software is a bet that people who want a creative suite they own will help keep it moving. Here is where a first contribution lands well, and what to expect from review.

Good first issues CONTRIBUTING.md

Ways to help that are not code

Try it and report

Open a real project of yours. Where it breaks, file an issue with the file (or a reduced one), your platform and pen. A reproducible bug report is the most valuable thing a non-developer can send.

Packaging

Flathub manifest. AUR submission of the three PKGBUILDs in packaging/arch. Nix. A Fedora COPR. Homebrew cask for the macOS build. Each of these is a self-contained afternoon.

Translation

The interface is English and Japanese today, with strings in src/lib/i18n.ts. Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Korean speakers are on the First Hundred artist list already; a translation would meet them.

Documentation

The user guide under docs/userguide is complete but written by the developer. Walkthroughs of a real workflow, with screenshots, are missing.

Testing on hardware we lack

Wacom on Linux, pen displays, macOS on Intel, Windows with high-DPI mixed monitors. Report what works and what does not.

Artwork

Every screenshot on this site is a UI capture, on purpose. Real comics, illustrations and video edits made in Sloom Studio, credited to you, would be shown here with your link.

Where a first patch lands well

These are real, scoped, and not blocked on architecture decisions. Each corresponds to an entry in the gap register, docs/userguide/15-qualified-missing-hundred-features.md, which describes the intended behaviour.

Font discovery and management (MH-030): a font manager panel over the already-audited 116-family bundled library plus system fonts.
Flow node keyboard accessibility (MH-013): full keyboard navigation of the node graph.
Canvas view rotation (MH-035) in Image, including stylus behaviour when rotated.
Bounded GIMP XCF import (MH-038): layers, masks and groups, nothing exotic.
Starter templates and a recipe gallery for Flow (MH-094), which is mostly content and a picker.
Scripting and headless automation (MH-084): a CLI entry point over the existing project and export code.

Larger items, such as real-time collaboration (MH-080), a plugin SDK (MH-083) or a vector discipline (MH-065), need a design conversation first. Open an issue titled with the MH number and say what you are thinking before writing code.

How review works

Open an issue or comment on an existing one so nobody duplicates work.
Branch, change, add or update the test next to the code. npm run build and npm test must pass.
Sign your commits with git commit -s. That is the Developer Certificate of Origin.
Open the pull request. Small and focused merges fast. The maintainer reviews within a few days; if the wait is longer, ping the thread.

The licence part, in plain words

Your contribution is licensed under the GPL like the rest, and you keep your copyright. There is also a short Contributor License Agreement: it lets the maintainer ship the GPL code alongside a proprietary engine plug-in and through app stores without asking every contributor again. The repository itself always stays GPL. Read it once; it is one page.

Conduct

Be direct and be kind. Review the work, not the person. Disagreements about design go in the issue, with reasons. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

Where to talk

GitHub Issues for bugs and proposals. Discussions for questions and show-and-tell. The forum for users who are not on GitHub. Bluesky for news.