Welcome

Sprit's'fast is a sprite and pixel-art editor with one unusual promise: nothing you draw is turned into pixels until it is shown. A pencil stroke is kept as the path the pencil took and the brush it took it with. A bucket fill is kept as the area it found. A rectangle is a rectangle. Pixels exist only on the screen and in the files you export.

That is why you can turn a layer by 23 degrees, scale it, change a palette colour, or change your mind ten steps back, and the picture is simply drawn again from what you did. Nothing is resampled, so nothing goes soft.

This guide is inside the program, works offline, and describes this version. Press F1 any time to open it, and use the search box on the left to find a word.

Where to begin #

New here? Read Getting started: five minutes from an empty canvas to a saved, exported sprite.
Coming from another pixel editor? Read Drawing, then Colour and palettes: the palette works differently, and it is the best part.
Making an animation? Animation, then Cutout puppets for characters built from parts.
Want to know what every key does? Keyboard shortcuts, or Help > Keyboard shortcuts, which also lets you change them.
Something is not working? Troubleshooting and limits.

What stays editable #

Because the work is kept as what you did, a great deal stays editable that is usually lost the moment you let go of the mouse:

Shapes: a rectangle you drew an hour ago still has its size, corners and handles.
Text: a piece of text is words, a place and a size, so a typo is retyped, not erased.
Colours: a colour painted through a palette slot follows the slot. Change the slot and everything that used it changes, on every frame.
Transforms: rotation, scale and offset are numbers on the layer. Set them back to zero and the original returns exactly.
Outlines and shadows: generated from whatever is drawn, so they follow it.

What it keeps for you #

Your work is written to .lsprite files. While you work the program also saves recovery copies, so a crash or a power cut does not cost you anything: see Opening, saving and exporting.

Sprit's'fast is free and open source (Apache License 2.0). It has no account, collects nothing and never connects to the internet.

This is the guide that ships inside the program (F1).