When Pretext hit 7,000 GitHub stars in its first three days — now grown to 29,500+ — developers didn't just star the repo — they started building. The pretext.cool community showcase now hosts 17 interactive demos from developers around the world, each exploring a different dimension of what becomes possible when text layout runs at near-zero cost.
Here's every demo, what it does, and what makes it technically remarkable.
By 0xNyk → Open demo
The most comprehensive single-demo exploration of Pretext's capabilities. The Playground packs multiple modes into one sandbox: an interactive ASCII dragon that swims through text on mouse movement, physics-driven letters that bounce and collide, fire breathing animations, and a 3D text tunnel effect. If you want to understand what Pretext feels like to interact with before writing any code, start here.
Tags: Interactive · Physics · ASCII
A fully playable Breakout/Arkanoid clone where every game element — bricks, ball, paddle — is made of text characters. Includes sound effects, score tracking, and multiple levels. The physics engine runs collision detection against actual glyph bounding boxes computed by Pretext, not approximated rectangles. A real game, not a toy.
Tags: Game · TypeScript · Canvas
By shinichimochizuki → Open demo
Classic Tetris with tetrominoes made of text characters. Each piece type uses a different character, and rotation is handled correctly for the actual glyph widths. The well fills with letters instead of colored blocks — and the line-clear animation is genuinely satisfying. A complete, playable game with proper scoring, levels, and game over state.
Tags: Game · Arcade
By Maxwell Ingham (somnai-dreams) → Open demo
Five polished demos in one package — a standout collection that shows the editorial and typographic depth of Pretext. Includes: an editorial engine with justified text columns, a fluid smoke ASCII simulation where characters behave like particles, a justification comparison tool, a variable typographic ASCII mode, and a shrinkwrap showdown that tests text wrapping at extreme container widths. Each sub-demo has its own carefully designed UI.
Tags: Bundle · Typography
Eleven distinct experiments under one roof — the deepest research collection in the showcase. Highlights include the original dragon animation (text parting around a swimming dragon), an anime walk cycle expressed in ASCII, masonry text layout, an editorial engine variant, and variable ASCII art that remaps glyph density to image brightness. Each experiment is a proof-of-concept for a different Pretext use case.
Tags: Dragon · Anime · Research
Click anywhere and watch text shatter. Each character becomes an independent particle with physics — velocity, gravity, rotation, fade. The explosive effect is fully real-time: character positions update every frame using Pretext layout, then render to canvas. The result is surprisingly satisfying, and the codebase is compact enough to study in an afternoon.
Tags: Motion · Particles
The iconic Star Wars opening crawl — "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." — recreated with perspective text animation and correct Pretext layout. Text width narrows as it recedes into the distance, which means line breaking changes continuously as the crawl animates. Pretext handles the recalculation every frame with no jank. Built with React.
Tags: Cinematic · React
Three experiments in one: a black-hole singularity effect where text is gravitationally lensed around a central point, a liquid dashboard grid where text blocks flow like fluid between layout positions, and draw-to-fill text vessels where you draw a shape and text pours in to fill it. Creative, unexpected applications of the layout primitive.
Tags: Creative · UI
A sprite you can drag through a paragraph of text. Wherever the sprite goes, the text reflows around it in real time — no debouncing, no frame drops, no layout lag. This demo is the clearest illustration of why fast layout matters: the same effect with DOM measurement would require 50–100ms debounce to be usable. With Pretext, it runs on every mousemove event.
Tags: Drag · Reflow
The most practical demo in the showcase: a testimonials component that auto-sizes quotation text to fill its container perfectly, regardless of quote length or container width. Resize the window and watch the text adapt instantly — not via CSS tricks, but via actual Pretext measurement and layout. A reference implementation for real product UI.
Tags: React · Practical
By SmisLee → Open demo**
Multi-column editorial text layout flowing around an animated analog clock. The clock ticks in real time, and the text wraps correctly around its circular boundary on every second. A technically demanding demo that combines custom clipping geometry, multi-column layout, and real-time reflow into something that looks like a magazine spread come to life.
Tags: Clock · Columns
Medieval illuminated manuscript aesthetic: gold leaf borders, decorative capitals, and a dragon that animates through the text columns in real time. The manuscript text reflows around the dragon's body as it moves, maintaining the visual coherence of the page layout. A surprisingly cohesive piece of generative art.
Tags: Art · Medieval
News-style multi-column text layout with a side-by-side comparison shim for benchmarking DOM measurement versus Pretext. Drag the container boundary and watch both columns update — one with DOM measurement lag, one with Pretext's instantaneous response. A useful reference for anyone trying to explain the performance difference to a skeptical colleague.
Tags: Flow · News
Text rendered as ocean waves on canvas. Individual words rise and fall with sine-wave motion, and their wrap geometry is computed by Pretext each frame to maintain correct line breaks even as words move. The result looks like a sea of language in gentle motion — meditative and technically precise.
Tags: Scene · Canvas
By CharlieGreenman → Open demo
A minimal proof-of-concept UI driven by DOM-free text measurement. Where most demos lead with visual spectacle, this one leads with utility: a clean interface that demonstrates Pretext's measurement accuracy for practical product components. A good starting point for developers who want to use Pretext in production UI rather than creative projects.
Tags: UI · Experiment
TensorFlow.js face tracking meets Pretext typography. Your webcam feed drives real-time text layout — look left, text shifts left; raise an eyebrow, text responds. The combination of ML inference and frame-accurate layout should be computationally expensive, but Pretext's near-zero layout cost leaves enough budget for TensorFlow to run comfortably. Requires webcam access.
Tags: TensorFlow · Face
The most analytically useful demo in the showcase. Side-by-side: 500 text blocks laid out with traditional DOM measurement versus 500 blocks laid out with Pretext, both responding to a resize event. Frame rate counters on both sides make the difference unmistakable. The DOM side struggles to reach 15fps at 500 blocks; the Pretext side runs at 60fps with headroom to spare.
Tags: Benchmark · Performance
These 17 demos represent the first wave of the Pretext community. New demos are submitted regularly — if you've built something with Pretext, you can contribute it to the showcase via GitHub.
Want to build your own? Start with the getting started guide or explore the Pretext Playground to experiment without setup.
All demos are open source. Click any demo to see the live version and find the source repo. Pretext library by chenglou. Community showcase at pretext.cool.