Graphite: Open-source raster and vector 2D graphics editor

by davikr • 3 years ago

171 64 3 years ago

dang• 3 years ago

Graphite – open-source raster and vector 2D graphics editor written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30675530 - March 2022 (18 comments)

1MachineElf• 3 years ago

So this appears to be a successor to Flash?

Yesterday I discovered flash was used to produce Rob Zombie's Dead Girl Superstar (2001) music video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WpHViVML_4o

I remember watching it on his flash-heavy website during that era, but it never occurred to me that it was anything more than just a recording converted to a flash video.

juancampa• 3 years ago

More like somewhere between Photoshop and Illustrator

malloryerik• 3 years ago

Looks like Affinity?

nonsense_stream• 3 years ago

Fireworks. There was another product from Macromedia that was not Flash, the Macromedia Fireworks. Never thought it would go into oblivion so fast, given I always felt it's of a far superior paradigm than any of the Adobe products in many use cases. After Adobe bought Macromedia, they killed it with all the other Macromedia products in favor of their own.

raincole• 3 years ago

It's more like they are trying to bring the nose-based workflow to 2D art.

It's already very common in 3D and VFX.

heybrendan• 3 years ago

Impressive project, although not what I thought of when I saw the name [1][2].

[1] https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html

[2] https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/who-is-using.html

jonwest• 3 years ago

It’s also now a Code Review platform (https://graphite.dev/) but your example was my first thought as well.

bradrn• 3 years ago

Also a font shaping engine: https://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=project...

Eisenstein2• 3 years ago

I wish it didn't run in a web browser. I know that makes it easy to get working for everyone, but I have never once been able to use a browser-dependent app for anything that wasn't trivial -- and I have tried.

Grum9• 3 years ago

".... usable instantly through a web browser or an upcoming native client on Windows, Mac, and Linux."

herewulf• 3 years ago

Indeed but by using Rust the project isn't painting itself into a corner. I seriously doubt the promised native versions will be simply shoved into Electron. Making it available on the web makes it easy to try which will help build the project.

entityDev• 3 years ago

Indeed. Not a fan of 'cloud'-based software or apps, because I know where it leads. Ultimate control over my usage by that corporation, and denial of future access through subscription models. Has happened before, and will happen again as everyone lets them get away with it.

udbhavs• 3 years ago

This is not exclusive to web apps though (especially open source ones)? I don't see how what you said doesn't apply to the Adobe suite which is native.

jansan2• 3 years ago

It is not a question about the app being cloud based or local, it's more a question about the openness of the file format. With a standardized file format you can always change to another software.

s1mon2• 3 years ago

Onshape is professional 3D mechanical CAD in a browser. It’s not at all trivial. Figma is professional graphic/interaction design that’s definitely not trivial. Onshape was acquired by PTC (makers of Creo) and Figma is being acquired by Adobe.

Keavon5• 3 years ago

The web browser gives us an extremely frictionless development and deployment process. Our CI generates a fully deploy at a unique link for every commit which lets us open and test PRs with a single click. It deploys updates to users without needing to make them go through an updater. In these relatively early stages of our development process, the importance of the velocity that gives us cannot be understated. Plus, the ability for users to try it out in one second is quite helpful.

I've designed the whole architecture specifically to avoid the web UI "feeling like a web app" with the subtle latency of interacting with the site. I wrote all-custom UI components using the minimal amount of HTML and CSS to achieve the requirements instead of depending on an external component framework which always loves nesting dozens of `div`s inside each other to achieve what should be doable in one or two. And our highly-lightweight JS which calls into Rust (Wasm) lets it keep the slow logic out of slow JS. And we are using Svelte to move most of the frontend DOM management logic from runtime to compile time. This architecture really helps us keep performance levels as close as possible to feeling native despite using the web for its GUI rendering; and I believe it has succeeded at feeling responsive by comparison to most other web apps you use (even Slack, for example, which shouldn't be nearly as complex).

Web lets us build fast, deploy the latest version to users fast, leverage prevalent developer experience with HTML/CSS for creating GUIs, and avoid getting stuck in a box with Rust's currently-immature GUI ecosystem. That's the tradeoff we had to make early on, and it was a good decision. But we will eventually move towards a fully native version...

In the short term, we plan to use [Tauri](https://tauri.app/) which is sort of a hybrid between Electron and a native application. It uses the OS's webview to shrink the shipped binary to only a few megabytes and reuse shared memory resources with other webviews at runtime. It also runs all our Rust code natively instead of through WebAssembly so all the business logic in Graphite runs natively and only the thin UI layer becomes dependent on web tech for the GUI display.

In the long term, we plan to rewrite the entire GUI in [Xilem](https://github.com/linebender/xilem) which is the up-and-coming Rust GUI that I believe will finally get everything right, including performance (which is something many desktop GUI frameworks are actually bad it, and sometimes even worse than web). We'll still deploy a web version but at that point, it will become native-first.

Hopefully that roadmap and explanation of the architectural decisions clears up any worries about the short and long term state of our GUI.

Eisenstein2• 3 years ago

I was unaware that this was still in an early stage of development and am glad to hear of plans to move forward on a native app.

Hopefully that roadmap and explanation of the architectural decisions clears up any worries about the short and long term state of our GUI.

Yes.

To expound on my original complaint about web apps in general, my main problems with them are:

* responsiveness -- specifically latency when using the gui, as well as the long staggering pauses when I don't know if I am waiting for the server to respond or if there is an app hiccup or if the thing is frozen (the random long unresponsive breaks is what made me unable to use Roboflow, for instance)

* file management -- having to do everything in the browser is frustrating because of the way the browser is separate from the OS and makes everything an 'app'. Having to import files to some server to work on them is annoying when they are right here in my system. I also like to manage the files in a specific way and have access to program and preference files and know where everything is stored (if it crashes I can find the temp files, for instance). Sandboxing the app from the OS is the opposite of how I want a desktop application to behave

* portability / offline use -- I don't want to login to use an application. I don't want my files on a cloud and I want to be able to use the application forever, even if the original company is defunct

I hope this sheds light on where I am coming from. It seems you thought of at least a few of these issues and are mitigating them.

Hamcha• 3 years ago

supercharges your layer stack

If you're a dev on an open source project, please hear my plea and stop trying to sell it like you're a hot startup.

Take inspiration from websites from projects such as OBS Studio, Handbrake or VLC (or Blender, but that is a very high bar). Those websites have none of the marketing lingo and all of the to-the-face info presented with easily digestible bullet points and pictures.

(to be clear, I don't have issue with the rest of the website, which is definitely not the case for a lot other projects I've seen)

layer8• 3 years ago

Whenever I read emotional adjectives like “delightful” (or worse, “beautiful”), I can’t take a project description seriously. Show me why I should be delighted, don’t tell me that I will. Because you don’t know me, and you should let me judge on my own. Such marketing language reads more like wishful thinking than anything persuasive.

kibibu• 3 years ago

"made with love in x" makes me want to curl into a tiny ball

LiamPowell• 3 years ago

To their credit, this may be the only Rust project that does not say "blazing fast" on the home page.

Maken2• 3 years ago

Not a single mention of memory safety either.

s1mon2• 3 years ago

This. I want to see screenshots and demo videos. At least they don’t have the explainer videos with the tall characters dancing around with quotes about innovation and synergy, or the talking head interviews with C-level execs talking about ROI.

junon4• 3 years ago

This was my exact thought. I was very on board until I read this and got ick'd out.

EspressoGPT• 3 years ago

But they haven't mentioned blazingly fast on their website... not sure if the actual downloadable binary is even written in Rust.

Keavon5• 3 years ago

Hi, Graphite creator and website author here. I 100% agree with you since I am very bothered by marketing copy that's painfully obviously written by a nontechnical marketing team, and I want to avoid that here.

But... I guess it's hard being on the other end when actually writing copy so I've failed to design text which can be highly terse and also descriptive of complex concepts without turning into paragraph-long explainers. I know what Graphite is in my head, but conveying that to newcomers is really challenging! But clearly I need to try again.

Is there any chance you'd be willing to reach out to me, ideally on Discord but email also works, and let me use you to test my copy to a fresh pair of eyes? Basically as a B.S. detector :) I'm currently working on a new revamp to the website with many new pages, so having a fresh perspective and some ideas how to make things more direct (but not necessarily overly technical, since it should be digestible to artists also) and less marketing-ey, I'd find that highly valuable.

zigzag3122• 3 years ago

Kudos for NOT creating another open-source copy of a commercial application, but for offering a fresh take on 2D graphics.

Many times, I've wished that Photoshop would have nodes instead of layers, as it would make some things much simpler. Or that Illustrator and Photoshop would be combined into a single app.

I'm really impressed. Node-based compositing is not a feature that Adobe can easily add to Photoshop, as that would change the core workflow.

pabl0rg• 3 years ago

Adobe used to have an app called Fireworks that was great for non-artists. They got it when they bought Macromedia. Too bad they killed it. I hope Graphite will replace it.

Maken2• 3 years ago

Adobe killed almost everything they bought from Macromedia.

knewter• 3 years ago

Fireworks was the closest thing to figma we got before figma. It was the very best webdev design tool before adobe bought and murdered it.

I remember being excited that Photoshop was going to start to work more like fireworks when they bought it. What a naive dummy I was.

zigzag3122• 3 years ago

I remember it. Fireworks was intended for UI design (like Figma or XD). It had both vector and raster tools, but they were quite basic.

Graphite looks like it could become the jack-of-all-trades app, since its foundation looks very flexible (i.e. the node graph). But, it is in its early development phase and adding necessary features is going to take many years.

13years6• 3 years ago

Or that Illustrator and Photoshop would be combined into a single app

This is why I have been using Affinity. Very well done integration of vector and image capabilities. However, their development has slowed significantly in recent years despite having a great product.

I hope that Graphite can be something new and become the blender of 2D image editing. There is nothing really out there right now that has the professional features of paid applications.

benterix• 3 years ago

their development has slowed significantly in recent years despite having a great product.

Did they comment on why this happened?

junon4• 3 years ago

Affinity is mismanaged and their developers have posted very publicly about being miserable there. The applications are buggy on a good day, unusable on bad days.

The premise sounded nice when I first started using them but I cannot in good conscience recommend either of them to anyone at this point.

cornstalks2• 3 years ago

Are there any vector graphics editors that support CAD-style constraints? That’s a holy grail I’ve been searching for but haven’t been able to find.

wes-k• 3 years ago

I'm working on a 2d vector editor that'll have that. It's basically a normal editor but where all properties can be expressions that refer to data or other objects. My first target use is for data visualization. What use cases are you interested in?

kfarr• 3 years ago

Not op but civil engineering (roadway design) is a common use case

cornstalks2• 3 years ago

Cool! I’ve been using Inkscape for floor plans and landscaping lately. And before that designing a custom split keyboard body. And random things to cut out on my Cricut.

I don’t need a full CAD constraint solver. Just simple constraints would go a really long way (make X the same width as Y; make A spaced N units from B; etc.). Basically just a glorified spreadsheet where object properties can be accessed and read from cells and objects can have other properties assigned from the cells. Though it doesn’t have to be represented as an actual spreadsheet, of course.

vchak25• 3 years ago

Not exactly CAD style constraints but close - https://cuttle.xyz/

Keavon5• 3 years ago

Yes, that is very much the plan! I'm glad you asked because it's good to know people are needing that functionality in the real world. It'll probably start out with simple constraints but ideally turn to the constraint stack system like that in Fusion 360 and other CAD software over time. (I need to actually learn Fusion 360 so I have firsthand experience with that, though, plus then I could finally stop just lazily using Blender for all my 3D printing models.)

meue• 3 years ago

Not so much constraints per-se, but from a CAD drafting perspective I use Illustrator with Astute's SubScribe [1] plugin (used to be free) and Hot Door's CADTools [2] (one-time cost ~$300). The former is lightweight (e.g. tangency/perpendicular, orient tools) which is pretty nice (especially if you have extend path options from VectorScribe, a separate plugin of theirs). The latter is very robust and probably has some features most people wouldn't need, but lets you get pretty technical with designs.

There's a new UI tool called Dora [3] that has a simple yet novel constraint system that you might like. Tool is still early alpha but growing quickly.

That being said, Graphite's node-based system makes it a viable foundation to build this on! I've helped contribute to the project and Keavon (the creator) definitely has some thoughts on constraint nodes (e.g. for snapping, but also for restraint/relationships).

[1] https://astutegraphics.com/plugins/subscribe [2]: https://www.hotdoor.com/cadtools/ [3]: https://www.dora.run/

ilc• 3 years ago

This name is well established as a trending and graphing open source project:

https://graphiteapp.org/

nico• 3 years ago

Does it have plug-in support? Can the plug-ins be written in a different language from Rust, maybe python or ruby?

Keavon5• 3 years ago

Plug-ins will (at least for the foreseeable future) take the form of writing custom nodes in Rust. That code will automatically compile to CPU and GPU (unless it requires an allocator or other things not possible on a GPU architecture). In the future that will extend to custom viewport tools, custom panels, etc. either through a traditional plug-in API or maybe even through defining all that in the node graph itself, since the graph is basically its own programming language.

We will probably also need to have bindings into a Python API since Python is so popular among technical artists. Precisely how that will be done is yet to be determined, since we have a lot to do before reaching that point.

3836293648• 3 years ago

I have been looking for something exactly like this. I've been using blender's composite mode, but that's so buggy in regards to transparency in the preview

brnaftr361• 3 years ago

I've been looking for a node based image editor for a while. It seems like something that would serve the scientific community by allowing people to program complex processes and handle images procedurally. If you aren't familiar, I would suggest you check out ImageJ/FIJI and perhaps consider integrating some of the analytic functionality into Graphite I definitely expect there's a market for it — I don't know anybody that likes using ImageJ.

logiczilla• 3 years ago

Well, this looks quite interesting. I've never used a node-based editor before and I've been using Photoshop since the 90s, and haven't used much else so I don't know what I'm missing.

I took a look at the demo and at first glance, it looks like the current version is just a basic image editor. I don't see any options to add noise, blur, filters, etc.

Also, curious to know about the graphite fileformat. When editing an image, are the set of transformations, etc. suitable for version control?

Keavon5• 3 years ago

We're in the process of refactoring a whole lot of code from the pre-node graph MVP implementation to the node graph version, while mainly aiming to avoid losing functionality in the process and not prioritizing new functionality quite as much yet. You can import or draw an image, though, and then right click in the node graph and search for certain effects and filters (similar to Photoshop's adjustment layers) and insert them in the chain of nodes. But to become actually useful, we need a bigger and more thought-out family of nodes combined with tools which automatically insert and update the nodes for you through the means of using the tools and doing lasso/marquee-style selections. Those are all a few months away on the roadmap, but it should be a lot more powerful and novel by then.

The file format will have its own built-in version control in the future, but I believe we are planning to use an ASCII representation so it could also theoretically be version controlled externally. The current `.graphite` files are entirely a temporary format. Once we finish the aforementioned refactor, we will design and implement a proper file format that ensures backwards compatibility (something the current files don't manage at all), it will be called `.gdd` (Graphite design document).

Graphite: Open-source raster and vector 2D graphics editor

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