v0.1.1  ·  Godot 4.7  ·  MIT

The vector editor
that's actually open.

Bezier paths, multi-artboard documents, a professional layer system and a magnet that snaps to everything. Built on Godot — small, fast, cross-platform.

GDScript ~98%  ·  285 tests  ·  Windows / Linux / macOS / Web

untitled.vtc — Vectopen
Artboard — 392 × 268 x 150
What's inside

A real editor, not a toy canvas.

Everything a vector workflow needs — and the plumbing (undo, snapping, artboards) done properly so it holds up in long sessions.

Bezier & path tools

Pen and bezier tools with editable control nodes, plus rectangle, ellipse, polygon, star and freehand. Text becomes real vector outlines.

Multi-artboard

Many artboards in one document, each its own coordinate space. A single manager owns placement, hit-testing and ownership — drag a shape across boards and it just works.

Professional layers

A layer tree that mirrors the real scene — drag-drop reparenting to any depth, per-row visibility / lock / clip, and stencil clip masks for groups and text.

Smart magnet

Snaps to edges, centers, equal spacing and distribution between neighbours — and to ruler guides you pull from the rulers. Full-width alignment lines and live pixel readouts.

Transform system

Move, resize, rotate, axis-locked drags and multi-select about a centroid — every gesture is one undo action with a full before/after snapshot. Escape cancels cleanly.

Effects pipeline

Drop & inner shadow, glow, blur, colour and gradient overlay, outline and a faux-3D effect — stacked non-destructively per object.

Themes & languages

Light and dark, switched live from design tokens. Interface localised across many languages, retranslated on the fly.

Plugins

Extend Vectopen with Godot editor plugins — import/export formats, tools and panels drop straight in.

Undo that holds

One history stack for the whole app — transforms, reparents, deletes and layer edits all record as complete transactions. Stress-tested to 100k+ objects.

Get it

Free, forever. Every platform.

Grab a build from GitHub Releases, or run it from source with Godot 4.7 — no build tools, no .NET, pure GDScript.

Windows

x64 · .exe Releases →

Linux

x64 · .x86_64 Releases →

macOS

.app / .dmg Releases →

Web

HTML5 · WASM Build preset →

Prefer to run from source? Install Godot 4.7 (GL Compatibility), clone the repo and open project.godot. The main scene is scenes/canvas/canvas.tscn.

Where it's going

Built in the open, one subsystem at a time.

The rule: don't build speculatively — pick up a performance or format task only when a real document exposes the limit. Every bug found becomes a permanent test.

Done
  • Multi-artboard architecture — one manager owns placement & ownership
  • Transform undo/redo for move / resize / rotate / axis-move, one action per gesture
  • Professional layers panel — deep drag-drop, clip masks for groups & text
  • Smart magnet snap — edges, centers, spacing, distribution, ruler guides
  • NodeState — formal non-geometric state capture for undo
  • Inspector & colour/gradient core systems
  • Light/dark theme from tokens · localisation · plugin loader
In progress
  • Bounding-box bug-hunt — the full handle × shape-type × zoom matrix
  • Font core system & the compact transform panel
  • Model / render separation — route live edits through the data model
  • Extreme-zoom camera precision (floating origin)
  • Tiered resource & geometry cache
Planned
  • .vtc document format — manifest paging / side index for huge files
  • Bidirectional SVG with real bezier curves (not polyline)
  • Group / ungroup with real hierarchy · node editing (add/remove/convert points)
  • Skew handles · align / distribute in the toolbar
  • Centralised command system · image trace · PDF / WEBP export
  • Parallel bake / serialize / import via worker threads

Full detail lives in ROADMAP.md.

Read the internals

Documented as it's built.

Bilingual guides (EN / ES) covering the architecture, the rendering pipeline, the layers panel and the systems shipped this cycle.

Blog

Blog

Notes from building Vectopen — what shipped, what broke, and why. Like Godot's devblog or Blender's weeklies, but smaller.

← All posts

MIT-licensed. No account, no telemetry, no catch.

Vectopen is a solo open-source project. Issues, pull requests and ideas are all welcome — the codebase is ~98% GDScript with a growing gdUnit4 test suite, so it's approachable.

EngineGodot 4.7
LanguageGDScript ~98%
LicenceMIT
Version0.1.1
Tests285 · gdUnit4
Format.vectopen → .vtc