An open-source vector illustration tool in Rust, from the ArtCraft family. It aims at the pen, panels, and shortcuts illustrators already know. It is still alpha.
A raster editor stores samples. Scale the image and you scale the grid. A vector editor stores anchors, handles, and fills, so a curve can be revised after it is drawn. PhotoCraft is the ArtCraft raster sibling. VectorCraft is the illustration sibling. They are not two skins of one program.
The project calls itself a clean-room, pure-Rust reimplementation of an Illustrator workflow. It runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and in the browser through WebAssembly. The license is MIT or Apache-2.0. Agents can drive menu items over a JSON channel, a CLI, and MCP. Clean-room and “agents can drive all of it” are project statements.
Bézier anchors, direct selection, and path edits.
Pathfinder-style booleans. The project claims exact curve booleans rather than a failed operation.
Layers, artboards, gradients, live blends, and effects that stay editable.
The ArtCraft page describes image tracing with presets. Confirm the current build before you depend on a preset count.
A documented .vectorcraft JSON document.
SVG and PDF import and export. PNG, JPEG, and WebP for screens.
PDF-compatible .ai is mentioned. The roadmap says real .ai files can open with the wrong layer structure and cannot be saved back with Illustrator’s editing data.
The README and the ArtCraft page say about 20,000 shapes render in about 27 ms at full retina resolution while the interface stays at 120 fps. That is a project claim. This deck did not rerun the scene, and it is not a comparison with Illustrator or Inkscape.
The commercial benchmark, including real .ai editing data and a mature ecosystem.
The established open-source SVG editor if you need a stable tool today.
Pixels, masks, and PSD. Use it when the problem is a photograph, not a path.
A Rust vector engine you can read, script, or try in the browser. Alpha, not a studio migration.
The roadmap updated 1 Nov 2026, reviewed 10 Oct 2026, still says alpha. Maintainers estimate feature depth around 75 percent and readiness for real Illustrator work around 62 percent, and they label those figures as estimates. They also say some machines fail to start the app, and that interaction has not been checked side by side with Illustrator. Hours-to-beta in that file are agent-time estimates, not a promise.
Public sources, read in November 2026. Projects move. Claims marked as project statements were not remeasured for this deck.