Tools#

At a glance#

• Brush, marker, Copic marker, pencil, smear, eraser, shape eraser, shape stacker, split, select, direct select, and text tools with pressure-aware variable line width. The Brush (B) is the tool called the Pen before 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0 (it was on P, which is Vector Path's now); files and scripts still call its marks pen. The eraser cuts what it passes over out of the drawing (see Eraser), the Shape Eraser cuts a dragged shape out of the selection (see Shape Eraser), the Shape Stacker merges the pieces of the selected shapes or takes them away (see Shape Stacker), Split cuts a path where it is clicked (see Split), the Select tool moves/deletes existing strokes (with rubber-band and Shift-click multi-selection), the Direct Select tool (A) drags individual anchor points to reshape a stroke, and the Text tool types a text that grows as it is typed, a text in a box or in a selected shape, or a text along a selected path, and edits a text it clicks on, on the canvas (see Type).
• A freehand stroke is a few Bézier curves. When a Brush, Marker, Copic or Pencil stroke is lifted, its samples - one every three quarters of a screen pixel
  • are fitted with the fewest cubic curves that stay within the Freehand fidelity of every one of them (1.5 screen pixels unless changed in Verbose Settings > Sketch Support, 0.5 to 8). A stroke across the page keeps a handful of anchors rather than hundreds of points: Direct Select shows them with their handles, the exports write them as curves, a drawn corner stays a corner, and a stylus's pressure is kept at every anchor, with an anchor more wherever it swells or eases. Two-point straight lines, shapes and erasers are left as they are.
• Translucent ink lies flat. A stroke is painted as one mark, so at less than full opacity it is one even tone along its length; it used to darken where its segments met, into a string of beads.
• Copic marker (K) — simulates an alcohol-ink marker's flat broad nib: strokes are thick when you pull across the nib and thin when you pull along it, like a real chisel tip. The nib is rotatable: hold Ctrl for one second to show a rotation indicator in the bottom-right corner, then hold Alt to rotate the nib clockwise or Shift to rotate it counter-clockwise; release Ctrl to finish. The hold time (0.5–2s), all three keys, the rotation speed, and the feature's on/off switch are configurable in the Settings window.
• Pencil (N) — a pencil from a drawing class's kit - graphite 4H to 8B, charcoal pencils, vine and compressed charcoal - drawn through the paper's grain: pressure darkens it far more than it widens it, and passes laid over one another build tone toward the lead's darkest. Its button opens the kit (see Pencil).
• Smear (Shift+N) — a blending stump for the Pencil's graphite: dragged over pencil marks it spreads their tone along the drag, softening hatching into shading (see Smear).
• Direct Select (A) - picks anchor points and the segments between them, with a click or with a box across several paths, moves them with a drag or the arrow keys, and deletes them, opening a closed path (see Direct Select).
• Sketch Support tools — a second toolbar section with Rectangle (R, Shift for a square), Ellipse (L, Shift for a circle), Curve (V: drag a chord that starts and ends at nearby stroke endpoints by default, bend, click to place — click and hold the button for the free-ends variant), Vector Path (P: an Illustrator-style pen — click for corners, drag for smooth Bézier points, click the first point to close or Enter to finish open; click a committed path to edit its anchors — add, remove, move, round, and re-handle points), Sharpen Selection (smooth and simplify the selected strokes with a live-preview dialog), Paint Bucket (G: fill an enclosed shape as a new selectable shape), Fill Color (click anywhere within an element's dimensions to select and fill it; with nothing under the click the current selection is filled) - both with the fill color, or the ink while the fill is none (see Fill and stroke) - Eyedropper (I: pick a color from the canvas and fill the selected shape), Rotate (Ctrl+R: turn the selection about a movable centre, by dragging on the canvas or by typing an angle), Mirror (O: reflect the selection horizontally, vertically or both, in place or as a copy that lands beside it), and Join strokes (Ctrl+J).

Eraser#

Changed in 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0: the Eraser added an invisible mark of its own to the layer in use, so an erase cut one mark at most - every mark is on a layer of its own - and not always the one under it; with a group row picked it made an empty layer to land on; and its marks could be selected and drew boxes over the ground they had erased.

Eraser (E): drag over the drawing, and what the swath covers is cut out of the marks it was aimed at - as they are, with no mark of the eraser's own and no new layer, in one undo step.

• What it cuts. With a selection, every selected mark, all of them - a selected group's too - and nothing else. With nothing selected, every mark the swath touches on a layer that can be drawn on, as a vector editor's eraser does. The cut shows on the canvas as the swath goes, and the release makes it.
• How each mark is cut. A filled shape, a Copic stroke or a profiled stroke loses the area the swath covered; what is left of its outline keeps its curves, and the swath's edge is fitted with a few anchors. A Copic or a profiled stroke, cut, becomes a filled shape in its colour. A plain Brush or Marker line is taken away wherever its painted width would reach into the swath, so no round end pokes into erased ground; what is left is the same line, in pieces, and still a line - its width, colour and Sharpen apply as before. A mark erased away is removed, and so is a layer left empty.
• What it passes over. Text and images are not erased; a toast says so.
• The box is the ink that is left. A cut mark's selection box, and every box built on it - Transform, Rotate, Move, Fit All in View - covers the ink it still has.

Older files. A file made before 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0 may hold the old Eraser's marks. They still paint and export as they did, but they are no longer picked, drawn a box, or counted in any box; they ride along with their layer, so moving or deleting the layer's mark takes their cuts with it. Sketch > Apply Erasers turns every one of them into the cut it paints - each cut out of the marks painted before it on its own layer, which is what the canvas showed - and takes it away, in one undo step. An eraser mark on a locked or hidden layer is left as it is.

Shape Eraser#

New in 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0.

Shape Eraser (Shift+E, beside the Eraser): select the marks to cut, then drag a shape over them. What the shape covers is cut out of every selected mark by the Eraser's rules - a filled shape loses the area, a line is taken away where its width would reach in - with no mark of the eraser's own and no new layer, in one undo step.

• The shapes. Pressing the button, or Shift+E, takes the tool and opens its panel under the button (beside it, on the side rail): Rectangle, Ellipse, Square and Circle as outline tiles, with Top Path across the bottom. The arrow keys move round the panel, Enter or Space chooses and Escape closes it; a press anywhere else puts it away. The shape chosen stays for the session, and the button's hover text names it. Shift makes a Rectangle square and an Ellipse round, as it does for the Rectangle and Ellipse tools.
• The drag. The shape's outline follows the pointer, and the selected marks show the cut inside it before it is let go. The release makes the cut; the tool stays in hand and the selection stays, for the next one.
• Top Path. Draw the shape to cut with on top - a Rectangle, an Ellipse, a closed Vector Path, any closed mark - select it with the marks under it, open the panel and choose Top Path. The topmost selected mark cuts the others and is taken away, as a vector editor's Minus Front does.
• When it has nothing to do. Nothing selected, only the one path selected, or an open path on top: a notice says which. Tick Do not show this notice again and, for the rest of the session, it is a toast instead; a new session shows it again.

Shape Stacker#

New in 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0.

Shape Stacker (Shift+M, beside the Shape Eraser): a vector editor's Shape Builder. Select two or more shapes, and the tool sees them as their pieces - every place where they overlap, and every place where they do not. Hovering shades the piece under the pointer with a light mesh.

• Merge. Drag across pieces: each one the drag crosses is marked, with the drag's path drawn over them, and the release merges them into one shape. It is painted as the topmost shape where the drag began, and every shape it took pieces from keeps the rest. A click on one piece makes it a shape of its own.
• Take away. Hold Alt at the press - the cursor's plus turns to a minus - and the pieces marked are taken away from every shape instead.
• A box. Hold Shift at the press to drag a box: every piece it touches is marked. A box begun on bare paper merges in the paint of the topmost shape it touches.
• One undo step each, and Escape during a drag drops it. The tool stays in hand, and what the stack made or changed stays selected with the rest, for the next stack; an undo clears the selection, as it always does, so select the shapes again to carry on. Hold Ctrl to select with the selection tool without putting the Shape Stacker down. Where a piece runs along a shape's own outline, the outline's curves are kept exactly.
• The Wipe Stacks. Pressing the button, or Shift+M, takes the tool and opens its panel under the button (beside it, on the side rail): the six Wipe Stacks as tiles - Wipe In, Subtract Top, Subtract Below, Mid Wipe, Outer Wipes and Clean Wipe - which work on the whole selection at once, greyed with fewer than two shapes selected. The arrow keys move round the panel, Enter or Space chooses and Escape closes it; a press anywhere else puts it away.
• When it has nothing to do. With fewer than two shapes selected, a press says so in a notice: "Select two or more shapes to stack." Text, pictures and placed files in the selection are left as they are.
• In a script, stack merge|remove <points> { ... } stacks the marks its block draws at the pieces under the points: see the drawing reference.

Split#

New in 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0.

Split (J, beside the Shape Stacker; the pair of Join's Ctrl+J): a vector editor's Scissors. Click a path and it is cut where the click lands on it - the topmost path whose line is within the Direct Select sensitivity of the pointer - and nothing moves.

• An open path becomes two. The first piece keeps the mark and its layer; the second is a mark of its own, on a new layer just above.
• A closed path opens there: one open path that starts and ends at the click, still looking as it did, fill and all. A second click then divides it in two.
• A shape with holes gives up the ring that was clicked, as an open mark of its own; the rest stays closed.
• On an anchor - within half the sensitivity of one - the cut is made at the anchor, and none is added. Anywhere else the cut is exact: a curve is divided so that both pieces trace it as it was, and a freehand stroke's pressure carries on through the cut.
• What shows. The pointer is a pair of scissors, and a small ring marks where a click would cut. Both pieces keep every paint property; they are selected, and Split stays in hand. One undo step each.
• What it cannot cut. Text, pictures and an older file's eraser marks say so in a toast, "Split cuts paths and lines", and a click on an open path's very end says there is nothing there to cut.
• In a script, split <x> <y> cuts the topmost mark drawn so far whose path passes within 4 px of the point: see the drawing reference.

Fill and stroke#

New in 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0.

Every mark has an outline, its stroke, and a closed shape a fill as well. The fill and stroke control in the toolbar, where the color well was, shows both, as a vector editor's toolbar does: the fill box and the stroke box, overlapping, the one in front being the one the colors paint. The fill shows a red slash while it is none, which it is until one is picked - a sketch's shapes are outlines.

• X puts the other one in front (Sketch > Fill in Front, ticked while the fill is). A click on the box behind does the same; a click on the box in front opens the color picker on its color.
• The colors paint the one in front. C and Shift + C step it through the Quick Access Colors - the fill's steps take in None, so the keys can take a fill away as well as give one - and a swatch or the color picker sets it. With the Select tool and a selection, a picked color reaches the selection as well: with the stroke in front every outline and text takes it, and a shape with no outline gains one; with the fill in front every closed shape is filled with it, in place of a gradient, and text takes it, while an open line keeps what it has. A picker drag is one undo step.
• New shapes take the fill. A Rectangle, an Ellipse or a closed Vector Path is filled with it, and the Paint Bucket and Fill Color paint with it - with the ink while the fill is none. The Brush, the Marker and the Copic draw lines, and take the ink alone; the Pencil draws in its lead's tone (see Pencil).
• Shift + X swaps them (Sketch > Swap Fill and Stroke, or the arrow at the control's corner). With the Select tool and a selection, each selected closed shape's fill and outline trade colors - a shape with no fill ends with no outline, and the reverse. Otherwise the ink and the fill trade; the ink is never none, so a fill of none has nothing to trade.

The Eyedropper still picks into the ink and fills the selected shape, as before.

Text tool#

Changed in 1.0.0-alpha.5.0.0: text was typed in a box laid over the canvas, Enter put it down, Esc threw it away, and a text once put down could not be edited again.

Text tool: click to begin a text that grows as it is typed; drag to draw a text box, its lines wrapped inside it; click inside a selected shape to set the text in the shape, or on a selected path to set it along the path, Alt swapping the two; click a text to edit it, the caret where you clicked. The pointer shows which a click makes. A path that is not selected stays a path, and the text is typed beside it. A double-click on a text with the Select or Direct Select tool edits it too. The text is typed on the canvas itself: Enter makes a new line, Esc puts the text down, and a burst of typing is one undo step. Type has the typing modes, the caret, selecting, the clipboard, the Type menu and the editor keys.

Copic marker#

Copic marker: the cursor shows the flat nib as a rotated bar matching the current width and angle. To rotate the nib, hold Ctrl until the rotation indicator appears in the bottom-right corner (1 second by default), then hold Alt (clockwise) or Shift (counter-clockwise); the nib turns continuously at the configured speed until you release. While the indicator is visible the Copic marker becomes the active tool with the stroke width scaled by the configurable width multiplier (1–4×, default 2×, capped at 40px) so the nib preview reads clearly as it turns; releasing Ctrl hides the indicator, ends rotate mode, and hands back the tool and width you were using before (unless you explicitly changed either in the meantime). Every part of this — the hold key, both rotate keys, the hold time (0.5–2s), the rotation speed, and whether the quick feature is enabled at all — lives under Copic Marker in the Settings window.

Pencil#

New in 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0.

Pencil (N): a pencil from a drawing class's kit, drawn through the paper's grain. It is modelled on a real pencil rather than on any editor's tool.

• The drawing kit. A press on the Pencil's button opens its kit beside it, as the Shape Eraser's button opens its shapes. N takes the Pencil up with no panel in the way, and N again opens the kit. Each chip draws a short line with its own lead:

  • Graphite: 4H, 2H, HB, 2B, 4B, 6B, 8B
  • Charcoal pencil: HB, 2B, 4B, 6B
  • Vine charcoal: Hard, Medium, Soft
  • Compressed charcoal: 2B, 4B, 6B

  The Pencil starts with graphite HB, and its button's hover text names the pencil in hand. Arrows move round the kit, Enter or Space chooses, and Escape closes it.

• How each lays down. Each grade has a tone, the darkest it lays down: graphite is a cool grey that never reaches black, charcoal a warm matte black. A harder grade is lighter, thinner and crisper, a softer one darker, broader and grainier; charcoal is the grainiest, with a powdery edge, and vine charcoal a broad, light stick. At one stroke width a softer lead draws a broader line.

• Pressure darkens far more than it widens. A light touch catches only the peaks of the paper's tooth, and a firm one fills the valleys as well. A mouse draws at a stylus's middle pressure.

• Passes build tone. The paper's tooth is fixed to the page, so strokes laid over one another catch the same peaks and miss the same valleys: hatching darkens toward the grade's tone and never past it, and the paper shows through the deepest valleys.

• The ink color does not change a pencil, as it does not change a real one. A selected Pencil mark recolored with the stroke in front becomes a colored pencil in that color.

• Otherwise it is an ordinary line. Direct Select shows its fitted anchors, the Eraser and Split cut it, Mesh Warp bends it, and each mark lands on a layer named Pencil 1, Pencil 2, and so on. Liquify leaves it to the Smear.

• Every export keeps it. The SVG fills each pencil line with the paper's grain, carrying the tooth once in the file, so a browser shows the same grain, and napkin reads its own SVG's pencil lines back as Pencil marks. A PNG has the canvas's pixels. The PDF and the Illustrator script draw each line flat at its pencil's mean tone, having no grain paint. A script takes up a pencil with pencil 2B (Drawing with napkin script).

• An older napkin opens a Pencil mark as a Brush mark in its tone.

Smear#

New in 1.0.0-alpha.4.6.0.

Smear (Shift+N): a blending stump for the Pencil's graphite. Dragged over pencil marks, it spreads their graphite along the drag: tone moves from where it is thick to where it is thin, the paper's tooth fills in, edges soften, and a patch spread thin lightens - shading, made out of hatching.

• What it smears. The selected pencil marks, or, with none selected, every pencil mark it passes, as the Eraser chooses what it cuts. It leaves every other mark as it is, and says so the first time: those are Liquify's to bend.
• The stump's size and strength. With the Smear in hand, Quick Width (W and a number) is the stump's size and Quick Opacity (Q and a number) its strength, 50% unless one is set. A stylus pressed harder smears more.
• The darkness is kept. The stump trades graphite with the paper - what one gains the other loses - so a smear moves tone rather than taking it away.
• Kept on the mark. Each pencil mark the drag reached keeps the pass, from where the stump first reached it to as far as it carried graphite past it. No mark and no layer is added, and the mark's box grows to take in where its graphite went. A smear moves, turns, mirrors, scales and warps with its mark. One undo takes the whole drag back, and Escape during the drag drops it.
• Every export keeps it. The SVG and the PDF write a smeared pencil mark as the picture the canvas paints of it, at twice the page's resolution, and napkin reads its own SVG's smeared marks back with their passes. A PNG has the canvas's pixels. The Illustrator script draws the mark unsmeared. A script smears with smear 24 0.6 10 80, 150 80 (Drawing with napkin script).

Sketch Support tools#

Sketch Support tools: Rectangle (R) and Ellipse (L) drag out a shape (hold Shift for a uniform square or circle) and commit it as an editable brush stroke. Curve (V) adapts to the input device: with a mouse it works in two steps — drag the chord, release, move the pointer to bend the curve through it, then click to place (Esc cancels) — because a mouse can hover between clicks. A pen or touch drag cannot hover, so those take the quick curve's single-gesture flow instead: the quarter arc follows the drag and lifting off places it. By default the mouse chord's start and end snap to nearby stroke endpoints; click and hold the Curve button to open its flyout and switch to the free ends variant (the small corner triangle marks tools with a flyout). Vector Path (P) works like a vector editor's pen tool: click to place corner points joined by straight segments, click-drag to place a smooth point and pull out its symmetric Bézier direction handles, with the next segment previewed live as a rubber band. Hold Shift to keep the next point, and the band, level, plumb or at 45° from the last point, and a pulled handle to the same eight directions about its own point. Once the path has two points, the pointer near the first shows the close indicator on it - a ring with four joins - and the band ends there: click to close the path. The indicator shows within the Direct Select sensitivity (8 screen pixels unless changed), which is where a click closes it, Shift or not. To finish the path open, press Enter, double-click, or simply switch tools — pressing S for Select, any other tool shortcut, or a toolbar button accepts the path as drawn. Only Esc abandons it. The path commits as an editable brush stroke, drawn exactly as placed (never auto-sharpened), and keeps its anchors — click it again with the Vector Path tool to rework them (see below). Paint Bucket (G) fills the enclosed path or shape under the click with the fill color - the ink while the fill is none - added as a new selectable shape. Fill Color selects the element under the click — anywhere within the element's dimensions counts, not just its outline, so clicking the middle of a shape picks it — and fills it with the fill color, or the ink; with no element under the click it fills the current selection (open strokes and text are recolored). Eyedropper (I) picks the color under the click (averaged over the Eyedropper sensitivity, 1–36px, default 10px), makes it the ink color, and fills the selected shape when one is selected; hold Ctrl for the selection tool, as on every drawing tool, and pick a shape, then release Ctrl to return to the eyedropper. Join strokes (Ctrl+J or the Join button) merges the selected strokes end-to-end into one stroke on one layer - the first stroke's - and the layers the other pieces vacated are removed with them, so a join leaves one element and one row rather than a stack of empty ones. The optional Join-on-snap setting consolidates the same way. Close Shape (press the button for its submenu) joins a selected stroke's two end points: Sharp bridges them with a straight line, Smooth continues the drawn directions through the seam with a curve, and a Vector Path stroke closes through its anchor model so the seam stays editable. Alt-drag copies the selection: hold Alt as a drag starts and the drag moves a duplicate while the original stays put - the copies land on new layer rows named <layer name> - copy (a copied group keeps its inner layer names; only the group row takes the suffix), and one undo removes the copy and the move together.