ENDE
Open Editor

Feature deep-dive

Everything Pincel does today.

Dense, honest, screenshot-led. Where a feature is still in progress, we say so. Where it's planned but not built, we say that too.

The Canvas

Smooth zoom and pan up to 64×, with pixel-perfect rendering. Cursor-anchored wheel zoom, auto-fit on open, and WebGPU rendering with a Canvas2D fallback.

  • + / - zoom
  • Space + drag pan
  • 0 fit to view

Tools

Pencil, eraser, bucket, line, rectangles, ellipses, rounded rectangles, polygons, eyedropper, move, text, and rectangle / ellipse / lasso / polygon / magic-wand selections. Each tool is small, focused, and built around pixel-perfect input.

  • B pencil
  • E eraser
  • G bucket
  • I eyedropper
  • V move
  • M selection
  • U shapes

Layers

Image layers, group layers, blend modes, opacity, visibility and locking, with thumbnails and drag-to-reorder. The Aseprite layer model — round-trips through Pincel and back into Aseprite without loss.

Frames & Animation

A timeline with per-frame durations, named tags with forward / reverse / ping-pong playback, onion skin, and sprite-sheet export with Aseprite-format JSON. Everything round-trips through the .aseprite file.

  • , / . prev/next frame
  • Enter play / pause

Tilemaps in progress

First-class tilemap layers. Build a tileset, stamp tiles on the canvas, flip and rotate per-tile, and edit a tile in place to update everywhere it appears.

Slices in progress

Define named rectangular regions, optionally with 9-patch borders and pivot points. Per-frame keys for animated regions. Your engine reads them straight out of the .aseprite file.

Palette

New sprites start with DB32. Switch to DB16, PICO-8, Game Boy or NES in one click, import and export GIMP .gpl palettes, and recolor, add, delete and drag-reorder entries; named entries survive the .aseprite round-trip.

File Format

Aseprite read and write are the source of truth — layer flags, user data and grid settings survive the trip. PNG frame export and sprite sheets with Aseprite-compatible JSON. Image mode saves OpenRaster (.ora). No proprietary format lock-in, ever.

Tablet & Pen in progress

Pointer events throughout, two-finger pan and pinch-to-zoom in both modes. On-screen Shift and Alt toggles stand in for the keyboard, and the Image-mode brush follows pen pressure and tilt.

Image Mode

A paint.net-style editor in the same app for everything that is not pixel art: PNG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, GIF and TIFF open with layers, blend modes, brushes, shapes, text, selections, transforms, and the full effects and adjustments set — limited to the selection when there is one. Large canvases render viewport-first. Save as OpenRaster to keep the layers, export flat images.

Desktop App

Native builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux via Tauri: the same editor with the system file dialogs, file associations, and "Open with" from Explorer, Finder, or the file manager. It installs for you only, without administrator rights, and updates itself in the background — every update signature-checked.

PWA

Install Pincel from your browser. It works offline, autosaves to IndexedDB, and keeps your files on your device. Use the File System Access API where available; fall back to download otherwise. The editor speaks English and German.

What's Coming planned

Lua scripting. Custom brushes. Headless Node API for asset pipelines. A read-only viewer for embeds. We ship in small, honest increments.