Lacoura Vector
Getting started with Lacoura Vector
Lacoura Vector is a vector drawing studio in a browser tab. Artboards, paths, live shapes and a real pen, with the geometry handled by a Rust engine compiled to WebAssembly.
Early access, and unusually honest about it. The full professional tool set is present in the tool rail, and the tools that are not built yet are visibly dimmed and say what they will do when you hover them. Nothing in the rail pretends to work.
Open the studio
Go to lacoura.com/vector and sign in. The studio opens at lacoura.com/vector/app. Use a desktop browser with a mouse or a tablet.
Draw something in five steps
- Make an artboard. Shift + O, then drag. This is the page your artwork sits on and the region that exports.
- Draw a shape. M for a rectangle, L for an ellipse, and drag on the canvas.
- Set fill and stroke. The two swatches at the foot of the tool rail. Click one to open the colour picker.
- Edit the points. A is Direct Selection — click an anchor and drag it, or drag its handles to bend the curve.
- Save. Save in the top bar writes a document file you can reopen.
Draw on the artboard. A new document opens with one already placed — the white page in the middle. The default fill and stroke are dark so everything you draw shows up on it. Out on the dark workspace around it, dark artwork is much harder to see; that space is for holding things, not for drawing on.
The tool rail
Two columns down the left. Each cell is a group: press and hold a cell and the rest of its group flies out horizontally over the canvas, with the tool’s name and shortcut underneath. A cell remembers whichever member you last picked, so a tool stays where you left it.
Twelve cells hold all forty-six tools. If you have been wondering where a tool went, it is almost certainly behind a hold — Polygon and Star sit under the Rectangle cell, and Arc, Spiral and Grid under the Line cell.
What works today
These tools are fully built:
| Key | Tool | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| V | Selection | Move, resize from handles, rotate from the top handle. Shift constrains. |
| A | Direct Selection | Anchor points and their handles. |
| P | Pen | Click for corners, drag for curves. |
| N | Pencil | Freehand. The stroke is simplified and fitted to curves when you lift the pointer, as one undo step. |
| T | Type | A real text box laid over the canvas. |
| M | Rectangle | |
| L | Ellipse | |
| \ | Line Segment | |
| — | Polygon | Regular n-sided shape, drawn from the drag box. |
| — | Star | Five points by default, inscribed in the drag box. |
| — | Arc | An open elliptical curve — a stroke, not a filled region. |
| — | Spiral | Winds inward over three turns. |
| — | Rectangular Grid | The outer box plus its dividers, as one strokeable object. |
| C | Scissors | Cuts a path exactly where you click. Cutting a rectangle or ellipse converts it to a path first. |
| Shift + O | Artboard | Create, move and resize artboards. |
| H | Hand | Pan. |
| Z | Zoom |
Everything else
The remaining tools are in the rail, dimmed, each with a note saying what it will do. Hovering one tells you whether the gap is the tool or the engine — Rotate and Scale, for instance, note that dragging in Selection already does the job. Clicking a dimmed tool reports why it did nothing instead of silently ignoring you.