Creation tools
At a glance
- Draw rectangles, circles, lines, and polylines with live preview tinted to the active draw color
- Open contours and edges stay easy to grab—pick through dense art without fighting filled regions
The Draw group covers the basic vector primitives, each on a single-key shortcut: Line (L),
Rectangle (R), Circle (C), Ellipse (E), Polygon (P), and
Text (T). Every tool renders a live preview while you
drag, tinted with the effective draw color — the active layer's color, or the last palette swatch
you armed. There are no parameter popups to dismiss; you draw directly in the viewport.
How each tool draws
- Rectangle drags corner to corner.
- Circle and Polygon drag from center out to a radius; Polygon makes a regular polygon (six sides by default).
- Line is a multi-point polyline: the first click starts it, each click adds a vertex, and a rubber-band preview tracks the cursor. Bring the cursor near the start vertex and the preview snaps to it — click while snapped to commit a closed polygon. Right-click commits the run as an open polyline and leaves the tool live for the next one; Escape or switching tools commits open too. Either way the result is a single polyline shape, not a pile of segments.
There is also a shared Shape Generator with a library of parametric shapes — sprockets, involute
gears, timing pulleys, trigger wheels, gussets, base plates — defined in editable .jshape files.
Picking through dense art
Filled interiors are intentionally not drag targets. Only rendered edges and open contours respond to a click-drag, so you can grab one contour out of a dense traced design without constantly snagging whatever filled region happens to be under the cursor. For everything else there is marquee selection and the center move handle.