I made a tiny plugin that lets Tiled load .p8 cartridges, edit the map section, and save them back without breaking the code or other sections. Works great for me, so I hope you may find it interesting!

Available on GitHub: https://github.com/samhocevar/tiled-pico8

Here is what it looks like with a dark theme and the grid color set to white:

Update 2021/02/20: The plugin was ported to JavaScript for compatibility with all OSes. Requires a preview version of Tiled (1.5.0) for now.

Oh shoot, this is incredibly useful! I've been looking for something like this for so long, even made a terrible attempt at doing it myself, heh, thank you so much!

"create a .tiled directory in your user directory"

What the heck does this mean for laymen, I tried installing it into the tiled "extensions" folder, but that does not seem to work.

@devilofether On Windows your user directory path is "C:\Users\<username>".
Related information also here: https://doc.mapeditor.org/en/stable/manual/python/
(You can also use File Explorer instead of the command prompt, if you want)

Wow, this is awesome! I love tiled and it will be cool to be able to use it here.

This would be such a blast. Unfortunately Tiled 1.3 does not seem to support Python3 on MacOS, where I live: https://discourse.mapeditor.org/t/does-tiled-1-3-support-python-on-mac-os-10-15/4158/2

Any ideas? How hard is it to rewrite the plugin in javascript? JS seems to be the recommended language now for coding plugins for Tiled.

I have started porting it to JS a few months ago (see the “javascript” branch) but some features were missing from Tiled. I think they’ve now been added so I’ll have another look at it.

Yes, awesome, @samhocevar! I guess I am not the only one who is on the fence for this. Students are doing a lot of PICO-8 games at our design faculty. Top-down adventures and jump'n'runs. Editing maps in Tiled would definitely push it to the next level. But we're using mostly macs … Let me know if I can be of any help!

@Tilman the JavaScript port is now complete. It requires Tiled 1.5.0 which is only available as a preview version for now. Enjoy!

Oh wow, that was fast. I set it up easily and I am blown away! This is incredibly useful. While having the .p8 open in Tiled, I can still work on the sprites in PICO-8. When I save they automatically update in Tiled on the fly! So I can still tweak some pixels or make new sprites in PICO-8, hit Cmd-S and switch to editing the map in Tiled! Save in Tiled and reload the .p8 in PICO-8 and the updated map is in PICO-8! Can't thank you enough, @samhovecar, for supercharging my workflow.

Looks really cool! But in Linux, i cannot load the .js file for some reason. I think it only supports .so files (like .dll files on Windows).