No installs. No accounts. No cost. Just open the browser and start designing.

If you've ever needed to quickly sketch a UI, create a diagram, or put together a simple graphic — and didn't want to open a heavy desktop app or sign up for yet another SaaS tool — Leafer Editor was built for exactly that moment.

It runs entirely in your browser. Everything you create stays on your machine. And it comes with a surprisingly complete set of design tools that cover the most common tasks you'd normally reach for Figma or Illustrator to handle.

Let me walk you through every feature.

The Canvas

When you first open Leafer Editor you're greeted with a clean infinite canvas — a grey workspace with a single white Frame sitting in the centre. That frame is your artboard, the area you design inside.

Pan around by holding Space and dragging. Zoom with the scroll wheel. The canvas is infinite — place as many frames side by side as you need without running out of room.

Frames — Your Artboards

A Frame is the container that holds all your design elements. Think artboard in Illustrator, frame in Figma.

• Every shape, image, and text block lives inside a frame
• Frames have a configurable width and height
• Elements that overflow the frame boundary are clipped
• Name frames whatever you like — names show in the Layers panel
• Create as many frames as you need — handy for designing multiple screens side by side
• Presets for paper sizes (A4, Letter, etc.), screen dimensions (1080p, 1440p, 4K), and social media formats (Instagram, Twitter, etc.)

Press F or click the Frame tool, then pick a preset or draw a custom size.

The Toolbar — 9 Tools, 9 Shortcuts

At the bottom of the screen sits the toolbar:

Every tool has a keyboard shortcut. Switch tools without touching the mouse.

Drawing Shapes

Rectangle

Press R, drag inside a frame. Resize with corner handles, rotate by hovering just outside a corner, round corners with the slider, and apply fills, strokes, shadows, and blend modes.

Ellipse

Press O, drag. Hold Shift for a perfect circle. Supports arcs and pie slices — great for charts and progress indicators.

Line

Press L, drag. Adjust stroke width, cap style (flat/round/square), and dash patterns for dotted or dashed lines.

Star

Press S, drag. Not just five-point stars — anywhere from 3 to 20 points. Adjust the inner radius ratio to morph from a sharp star to a flower shape.

Pen

Press P. Click to place anchor points, drag to create curves. Build custom paths and bezier shapes.

The Text Tool

Press T, click inside a frame, and start typing. Leafer Editor uses an inline text editor on the canvas — no modal, no separate input box. Type directly on the canvas, Figma-style.

The Properties panel gives you full typography control:

• Font family — ~40 popular Google Fonts, each previewed in its own typeface in the dropdown
• Font weight — Normal, Bold, 600, or 800
• Italic
• Alignment — Left, Centre, Right, Justify
• Line height and letter spacing

Fonts are lazy-loaded — only the ones you use are downloaded.

The Image Tool

Press I to open a file picker. Select any image (PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF) and it appears on the canvas at a sensible size. Drag to reposition, resize with handles, and apply opacity and blend modes like any other element.

Everything stays local. Images are never uploaded anywhere.

The Select Tool

Press V to work with elements you've already created:

• Click an element to select it and see its properties
• Drag a selection box to select multiple elements at once
• Drag to move selected elements
• Corner handles to resize
• Hover just outside a corner to rotate
• Click empty space to deselect

When multiple elements are selected, property changes apply to all of them simultaneously.

The Properties Panel — Deep Styling

The right-side panel is context-aware — different controls depending on what's selected.

Fill

Solid colors via hue-saturation picker with hex/RGB inputs. Switch to gradient mode for linear or radial gradients with a multi-stop gradient bar — click to add stops, drag to reposition, double-click to remove.

Stroke

Border color, width, and alignment — inside, centre, or outside the shape boundary. Cap and join styles for lines.

Opacity

Slider from 0% (invisible) to 100% (fully opaque) for the entire element.

Blend Modes — 16 Modes

Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Darken, Lighten, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Hard Light, Soft Light, Difference, Exclusion, Hue, Saturation, Color, Luminosity — plus Normal.

A black rectangle set to Multiply lets the texture of the layer below show through. These unlock a lot of creative effects.

Shadows

Drop Shadow — offset X/Y, blur, spread, and color. Inner Shadow — same controls, pressed-in or embossed look. Both update in real time as you tweak sliders.

Action Bar

A context bar at the top of the canvas for common operations:

• Group — combine selected elements into a group
• Mask — apply clipping masks for advanced shape workflows
• Bring to Front / Send to Back — control z-order with one click
• Lock / Unlock — prevent accidental edits
• Delete — remove selected elements

Smart Snap Guides

Drag any element and dashed alignment lines appear automatically — showing when you're aligned with another element's edge or centre, or with the canvas grid. The element snaps into place when you're close.

No more manual positioning or mental math about coordinates.

The Layers Panel

Switch to the Layers tab to see your canvas as a tree — every frame with all its children in z-order.

• Click any layer row to select it on the canvas — great for elements hidden behind others
• Drag and drop to reorder — canvas updates instantly
• Double-click a name to rename — keeps large designs navigable
• Lock and visibility toggles — hide elements while you work, lock the ones you're done with
• Type icons beside every row — rectangle, circle, text, image, frame

Export Panel

When your design is ready, export it in any format:

Export individual elements or entire frames. Pick the resolution — 1x, 2x, 3x, or custom.

Keyboard Shortcuts Summary

The Tech Stack (for developers)

The entire editor is ~50 source files. The canvas layer (editorCanvas.ts) creates a Leafer App with an embedded Editor instance. Drawing tools are registered as custom tool classes. State flows through a single TanStack Store, keeping the React UI and canvas engine in sync.

Try It Yourself

git clone https://github.com/fayismahmood/leafer-editor.git
cd leafer-editor
pnpm install && pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000. Click "Open Editor" and start designing.

Or try the live demo: leafer-editor.vercel.app

What's Next

Leafer Editor is in active development. On the roadmap:

• Undo / Redo — full history stack
• SVG export — vector format support
• Multi-page support — organise multi-screen designs in one file
• Collaborative editing — real-time multi-user canvas
• Desktop app — wrapped with Tauri for offline use

Why I Built This

I wanted a design tool that gets out of the way. No accounts. No Electron bloat. No feature creep. Just a canvas, some shapes, and the ability to export something useful. The idea was to prove that a production-quality canvas experience can fit in a ~50-file TypeScript codebase running entirely client-side.

If that resonates — designer looking for a lightweight tool, or developer curious how a canvas editor is built from scratch — Leafer Editor is worth a look.

Star the repo, try it out, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Leafer Editor is MIT licensed. Built with Leafer UI and React.