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.
