Skechworks

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Why I built Skechworks

One evening I checked my oldest design files. 240 of the 393 .sketch files on my machine no longer open, because the formats they were saved in have been abandoned. The work didn't wear out. The software left.

It had happened to me before. I used Fireworks religiously until Adobe killed it in 2013, and nothing since has wanted to be what it was: one person, one file, pixels and paths in the same canvas, assets out the door by lunch.

Skechworks is how I make sure neither eviction happens again. It's a 3 MB native Mac app with no account, no subscription, and no telemetry. Every document is a PNG with its own source riding inside, so even if this app disappears, unzip gets your artwork back as plain SVG. The escape hatch is the file format.

Quick start

Grab the signed, notarized build, unzip, drop it in Applications, open. Or build it yourself:

git clone https://github.com/adamhowell/skechworks.git
cd skechworks
./bin/build
open build/Build/Products/Release/Skechworks.app

What it does

• Pen tool with live booleans. Subtract a shape and both parts stay editable. Double-click straight into a combined shape, even into the holes it cut.
• Auto Shapes. Stars and polygons remember their recipe. Change 7 points to 5 and the shape re-draws.
• Live text, with every property editable, including text set on a circle.
• Quick photo work. Crop, brightness, contrast, saturation, marquee and brush erase. All of it is non-destructive, so the pixels underneath are never touched.
• Reads your old .sketch files. Verified pixel-for-pixel against Sketch's own render on a 62-file corpus.
• Export that behaves. SVG, PNG, JPG at 1x to 3x, straight from the inspector. The canvas and the exporter draw through the same code, so they always agree.

AI that helps you work smarter

The built-in chat handles the busywork:

rename these forty layers reorder the layer list to match the canvas make every black fill our brand blue swap the headline on all six artboards

Use your own OpenRouter key or Skechworks credits. There's nothing to download either way. It only acts when you ask, every change lands as one ordinary undo step, and your files are never used to train anything.

The format

An .sw is a PNG and a ZIP at the same time. This is the Fireworks .fw.png trick, which nobody has shipped since 2013. Finder thumbnails it, renaming it to .png makes it a picture anything can open, and unzip produces every page as SVG, the document as readable JSON, and the placed images. There is no step where you need this program to get your artwork back. Details in docs/format.md.

Design notes

Zero dependencies, because a tool whose job is outliving other software shouldn't inherit anyone's supply chain. CoreGraphics does the hard math, since macOS ships curve-preserving path booleans. One compositor feeds both the canvas and the exporter. Text is always outlined, so an export never depends on the viewer having your fonts. More in docs/design-notes.md.

License

MIT. If this project ever stops, fork it. The build instructions above are the whole ceremony.