Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior. You can try it in your web browser right now.
Decker is a painting program. It's also a presentation tool, a database, and a game engine. It's a holistic medium and toolkit for digital arts and crafts. You could write a zine, build an adventure game, make a utility program, or doodle some pixel art, all in a single environment which erases the divisions between users and authors.
You can save a deck as a single self-contained
Many Decker projects don't need any programming skills at all. You can wire up navigation within a deck, record and play back sounds, add transition effects, play with fancy brushes, and use a variety of community-crafted interactive contraptions to add behaviors to your decks, all with a few clicks and drags of your mouse.
When you feel ready- and a project calls for it- you can dip your toes into Lil, Decker's beginner-friendly scripting language. Lil is strongly influenced by Q, a functional language in the APL family. It's conventional enough not to ruffle too many feathers for users with prior programming experience, but if you give it a chance you might be surprised at its concision and expressive power.
Everything interactive in Decker is made out of "widgets"- buttons, fields, sliders, canvases, grids, and more. You can build new widgets and share them by simply copying them to the system clipboard and pasting them into another deck, or anywhere you can share or store text. You'll find that every deck is a toolkit of reusable parts that can be harvested and repurposed for another project.
Decker is command-line friendly: when built from source, it comes with Lilt, a standalone Lil interpreter which can (among other things) read, write, manipulate, and even execute Decker documents "headlessly". Decks are stored in a line-oriented text format which interoperates well with existing source control tools like Git and SVN.
Decker includes no advertising, telemetry, gamification, slop-generator integration, or other intrusions on user privacy and autonomy. If you like Decker, please share it with other people who might enjoy it. Build something that makes you happy.
Browsable source code and a bug-tracker are available on GitHub. Decker is free and open-source, under a permissive MIT license.
Periodic binary release downloads for MacOS and Windows are available on Itch.io. The Itch page includes a community forum for discussing Decker and sharing projects made with Decker. We also hold Decker-themed "Game Jams" every July and December; the next upcoming jam will be Deck-Month, December 2026.
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