fka loompad
textile is a loom for language models. You generate text, branch from any point, and navigate the full tree of what's possible.
Language models don't give you one answer. They give you a probability distribution over all possible continuations. Most chat interfaces hide this - they sample once and show you a single thread, even though the model could have gone a thousand different ways.
A loom makes that branching visible. Generate multiple continuations from any point. Navigate between them to compare. Backtrack and try different paths. Watch the tree grow as you explore.
Every conversation with an AI is a reasoning trace - a path through possibility space that develops its own character. But chat interfaces treat these as disposable. You can't branch, you can't see alternatives, and sharing means losing the structure. A loom makes the tree first-class. Every branch is preserved.
textile looks like a GameBoy. You navigate with a d-pad and buttons, or with your keyboard: arrow keys, Enter, Backspace, Escape, backtick. Works on desktop and mobile.
It connects to OpenRouter, so you can use whatever model they have: Llama, DeepSeek, Gemini, Claude, GPT-4, Mistral.
Branching: Press Enter to generate continuations - 3 branches from a fresh node, 1 if you're adding to an existing set. Arrow keys move through the tree: up/down for depth, left/right for siblings. A minimap shows your full story tree. Dots at the bottom show how many branches exist at your current position.
Auto-loom: Set iterations to 1, 2, 3, or infinite. The model generates branches, judges which to continue from, generates more. Watch a story write itself. Infinite mode caps at 25 iterations.
Length control:
- Word: single words, 12 tokens max
- Sentence: stops at punctuation, 120 tokens
- Paragraph: stops at blank lines, 400 tokens
- Page: longer chunks, 900 tokens
Storage: Stories save to your browser automatically. Switch between them, create new ones, delete old ones. Export as JSON (full tree) or plain text (current branch).
Theming: 14 color schemes - terminal greens, amber phosphor, LCARS, outrun pink, classic Mac, Win95 blue screen, more. 16 monospace fonts. Light mode, dark mode, or system.
PWA: Install to your home screen. Reading and navigation work offline. Generation needs a connection.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrows | Navigate the tree |
| Enter | Generate |
| Backspace | Open actions for the current node |
| Escape | Toggle minimap |
| ` | Open settings |
Same mappings on the touchscreen d-pad.
textile is a small, tactile explorer for branching looms, including stories, conversations, and other Lync histories. It is not a general collaboration dashboard. Lync owns portable append-only interchange; textile makes one path, its nearby alternatives, and the shape of the larger tree legible.
Keep these constraints when changing the interface:
- One monospace size, one character grid. Hierarchy comes from position, spacing, and colour—not smaller captions, badges, or extra type scales. The only deliberate exceptions are the enlarged glyphs inside the physical gamepad buttons.
- One grammar per projection. Loom, map, floor, and menu may map the d-pad differently, but the mapping does not change contextually within a projection. START and SELECT move between projections rather than adding more controls.
- The existing map is deliberate. Preserve its node geometry and layout. Camera fitting and containment may change when needed; the node visualization itself is not an open redesign surface.
- The floor is a spatial dial. Loom roots retain their order and move under a fixed centre; the selected root blooms in place. Pill height encodes loom size. The dial clamps and bonks at its ends instead of wrapping, preserving spatial memory.
- Actions use one bottom sheet. The focused loom, map, or floor remains
visible while its action menu rises from the bottom of the inner viewport.
Action sets are data rendered by the shared
ActionMenu, not separate full-screen menus. - Durable authorship is not presence. Per-turn actor/controller provenance and coauthored Lync histories are part of the document. A who's-here roster, live cursors, typing indicators, Automerge presence, and CRDT collaboration are not part of textile's product direction.
- Nothing important fails silently. Imports, saves, deletes, exports, and generation failures should report their outcome in the existing interface idiom; do not fall back to native prompt or confirmation dialogs.
The controls remain bottom-anchored and mobile-first. Add expressive range by composing the existing projections and verbs, not by accumulating chrome.
Requires Bun.
bun install
echo "OPENROUTER_API_KEY=your_key" > .env
bun run devDev server runs at localhost:5173 on macOS, localhost:5000 elsewhere (see server/args.ts; override with PORT=).
For production:
bun run build
bun run prodProduction deployments need OPENROUTER_API_KEY and at least one access gate:
TEXTILE_SITE_PASSWORD for browser users, TEXTILE_API_AUTH_TOKEN for trusted
scripts/server clients, or both. The API token is accepted as
Authorization: Bearer <token> or x-api-key, including for /lync websocket
sync upgrades.
/lync websocket sync uses a 30s relay heartbeat by default. Set
LYNC_KEEPALIVE_INTERVAL_MS if a deployment needs a different watchdog window.
Set LYNC_AUTH_MODE=public to run /lync as a stock Automerge sync endpoint
for native websocket clients; HTTP generation APIs remain protected by the
normal site/API auth gates.
textile/
├── client/ # React frontend
│ ├── interface/ # Components, hooks, menus
│ └── styles/ # CSS
├── server/ # Express backend
│ ├── apis/ # Generation, judging, models
│ └── data/ # Model configs
├── shared/ # Shared types
└── config/ # Vite config
React, Vite, Express, TypeScript, Tailwind. OpenAI SDK pointed at OpenRouter. d3-flextree for tree layout. vite-plugin-pwa for offline support.
D-pad navigation maps naturally to tree traversal. Up/down for depth, left/right for siblings. The aesthetic is fun but the controls are genuinely good for this.
MIT