Dadaki

Dadaki › Features

A pen tool that behaves like the one you learned

The pen tool is the load-bearing part of any vector editor. If it is subtly wrong, everything drawn with it is subtly wrong, and you feel it before you can name it.

Open the editorNo sign-up, no download. It opens on a blank canvas.

Drawing a path

  1. Press PThe pen arms. The cursor becomes a crosshair.
  2. Click for a corner, drag for a curveA click drops a sharp anchor. Clicking and dragging pulls out the bezier handles as you go, so the curve is shaped in the same gesture that places it.
  3. Close it, or do notClick the first anchor again to close the shape. Press Enter or Escape to finish the path open — a line rather than an outline.
  4. Fix it afterwardsPress V, then double-click the path to enter node editing. Drag anchors, drag handles, and hold the add-point modifier to insert a node in the middle of a segment.

While a pen path is open, the keyboard belongs to the pen. That is deliberate and it is the single most useful thing to know about the editor's keyboard: a mode owns its keys, so Enter finishes the path rather than doing whatever Enter does elsewhere.

The rest of the path toolkit

Pencil (N)

Draw freehand and the stroke is fitted to a smooth bezier as you release. For organic shapes it is far faster than placing anchors by hand, and the result is still a normal editable path.

Scissors (C)

Cut a path at any point along a segment, splitting one path into two.

Join

Select two open paths and join their loose ends back into one.

Simplify

Reduce the number of anchors on a noisy path — the usual cleanup after a traced or freehand curve — while holding the shape.

Offset path

Generate a new path a fixed distance inside or outside an existing one. Outlines, insets, and the geometry behind a lot of icon work.

Outline stroke

Turn a stroke into a filled shape, so its width becomes real geometry you can edit, boolean and scale independently.

Why it feels responsive

Curve fitting, hit testing and the geometry underneath node editing run in a Rust crate compiled to WebAssembly, not in JavaScript, and the canvas is painted by Skia through CanvasKit. The practical consequence is that dragging a handle on a complicated path does not go soupy.

Dadaki is free and the editor is open source under the MIT licence — the whole thing is on GitHub. There is no watermark, no export limit and no paid tier gating the drawing tools. An optional account adds cloud sync and shared team files; everything else works signed out.

Open the editorNo sign-up, no download. It opens on a blank canvas.

Questions

Is there a free online pen tool?

Yes — Dadaki's pen tool is free, needs no account, and runs in the browser. Press P and start drawing.

How do I edit a curve after drawing it?

Press V for the Select tool and double-click the path. That enters node editing, where you can drag anchors and their handles, add points along a segment, and delete points.

Can I convert a freehand drawing into clean curves?

Draw with the pencil (N) and the stroke is fitted to a bezier automatically. If it still has too many anchors, run the simplify command to reduce them.

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