With 96 tools, Media & Design is ToolShelf's largest category — and its most eclectic. This is where AI-powered UI generators sit alongside GPU-accelerated terminals, where text-to-speech models share shelf space with Git UIs. The common thread is developer experience: tools that make the visual, auditory, and interactive parts of software development faster and better.
By the Numbers
- 96 total tools tracked
- 93 open-source
- 3 free or freemium
- 0 paid
Ninety-three open-source tools out of ninety-six. The creative tooling space — long dominated by Adobe's subscription model — is being rebuilt from the ground up by open-source communities.
Key Trends
1. AI-Native Design and UI Generation
v0 has changed how developers think about UI. Instead of manually writing component code, you describe what you want and get production-ready React components back. It is not replacing designers — it is replacing the tedious translation step between "I know what this should look like" and "I have working JSX." For prototyping and internal tools, v0 has cut the time from idea to working UI from hours to minutes. The AI-native design category barely existed a year ago; now it is one of the fastest-growing segments we track.
2. AI Media Generation Goes Local
Two tools highlight how AI content generation is moving off cloud APIs and onto local hardware. FramePack brings video generation to consumer GPUs — you can generate short video clips locally without sending data to any external service. Spark-TTS does the same for voice synthesis, producing natural-sounding speech from text using models that run on your own machine. The local-first pattern matters for privacy, cost, and iteration speed. When generation takes seconds instead of API round-trips, creative experimentation becomes viable.
3. GPU-Accelerated Terminals as Creative Platforms
The terminal renaissance continues. Kitty and WezTerm have pushed GPU-accelerated terminal emulators beyond fast text rendering into genuine creative platforms. Kitty's image protocol lets you display images, charts, and even animations inline in your terminal. WezTerm's Lua-based configuration makes it programmable in ways that traditional terminal emulators never were. For developers who live in the terminal, these tools have eliminated the need to switch to a graphical application for visual tasks.
4. Developer Utility Suites
DevToys packages dozens of common developer utilities — JSON formatting, base64 encoding, UUID generation, hash computation, color conversion — into a single offline application. Think of it as a Swiss Army knife that replaces twenty browser tabs of online converters. Raycast takes the utility concept further with a launcher that integrates with your entire development workflow: clipboard history, snippet expansion, window management, and custom extensions written in TypeScript. Both tools bet that small, frequent productivity gains compound into significant time savings.
5. Git Gets a Better Interface
lazygit has quietly become one of the most beloved developer tools on ToolShelf. Its terminal UI makes interactive rebasing, cherry-picking, stash management, and conflict resolution feel intuitive rather than terrifying. For developers who know Git's concepts but struggle with its CLI syntax, lazygit bridges the gap perfectly. It does not hide Git's complexity — it makes it navigable.
6. AI-Powered Knowledge Management
Dust represents an emerging sub-category: AI assistants that connect to your company's internal knowledge bases, documents, and tools. Rather than generating content from scratch, Dust retrieves and synthesizes information from sources your team already uses. It is the media tool for people whose "media" is internal documentation and institutional knowledge.
Top Picks
| Tool | What It Does | Score | |------|-------------|-------| | lazygit | Terminal UI for Git | 58 | | Kitty | GPU-accelerated terminal with image support | 52 | | DevToys | Offline developer utility suite | 44 | | WezTerm | GPU-accelerated terminal with Lua config | 44 | | v0 | AI-powered UI component generator | -- | | Raycast | Extensible developer launcher | -- | | FramePack | Local AI video generation | -- | | Spark-TTS | Local AI text-to-speech | -- | | Dust | AI assistant for internal knowledge | -- |
Getting Started
Start with the tools you will use daily. lazygit transforms Git workflows immediately — install it and you will wonder how you used Git without it. Add DevToys or Raycast for the small utilities you reach for constantly.
If your terminal is still the default macOS Terminal or Windows Terminal, upgrade to Kitty or WezTerm for a meaningfully faster and more capable experience.
For AI-powered creation, try v0 the next time you need a UI component, and explore FramePack or Spark-TTS if you are curious about local media generation.
Explore all Media & Design Tools tools on ToolShelf.