Context Free

What is Context Free?

Context Free turns written design rules into images. Instead of placing every shape by hand, you describe how shapes expand, transform and combine in a CFDG grammar. Its graphical editor lets you change those rules and render the result, making it useful for exploring procedural patterns and variations. Built-in examples give you a starting point before writing your own designs.

The publisher's suggested first steps are to open a design from the Examples menu, watch it render, and render it again to explore any randomness in its rules. Read the included lesson to understand how the grammar builds its shapes. Finished images can be saved as PNG or SVG, and the program also supports animation. The Windows installer includes ContextFreeCLI.exe for command-line rendering.

The official download page lists version 3.4.3, released in June 2026, for Windows 7 and later. It describes a local executable installer that places the program in ApplicationData\Local. The same page warns that some constant expressions passed as the first argument of if() or select() can raise an uncaught compiler exception. This is a rule-based art tool: editing your own designs means learning CFDG syntax. The screenshot shows an older Windows interface and is not evidence of the exact appearance of version 3.4.3.

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