Rovar

English | 简体中文

A design editor built with Rust and GPUI, available on desktop and the Web.

Supports artboards, vectors, text, images and video, auto layout, reusable components, multi-page documents, and PNG/SVG export. Use it locally or connect to a server with personal and team workspaces. Available in English and Simplified Chinese.

I want to build a beautiful, cross-platform UI design tool that is easy for AI agents to operate, while using the project's real-world needs to improve and extend the GPUI framework.

• Canvas editing — artboards, layers, multi-page documents, vector shapes, Bézier paths, and text.
• Auto layout — horizontal and vertical layouts, wrapping, alignment, padding, gaps, fixed/hug/fill sizing, and minimum/maximum dimensions.
• Grid layouts — fixed or equal column widths, row and column gaps, automatic placement, and row/column spans.
• Responsive layouts — edge, center, stretch, and scale constraints, plus frame size presets for phones, tablets, desktop screens, and more.
• Precision tools — snapping, distance measurements, equal spacing, multi-selection resizing, repeated duplication, and on-canvas corner editing.
• Colors and gradients — document color styles, color libraries, linear, radial, angular, and diamond gradients, plus four-point fills with draggable color sources.
• Reusable components — component libraries, instances, overrides, and updates.
• Boolean operations — union, subtract top layers, intersection, and exclusion for closed shapes and Bézier paths. Operands remain editable and can be released; combinations use the bottom layer's appearance and support PNG/SVG export.
• Vector masks — use the bottom closed shape or Boolean group to clip selected artwork. Edit the mask and content independently, nest or release mask groups, and export to PNG/SVG.
• Layer blending — Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Darken, and Lighten modes with independent layer opacity. Apply opacity to whole groups and preserve blending in PNG/SVG exports.
• Component variants — named versions in component sets, edited on canvas with the property panel, and instance switching that preserves matching overrides.
• Shadows — stacked outer and inner shadows for frames, shapes, images, and text, with offset, blur, spread, color, opacity, and PNG/SVG export.
• Layer blur — adjustable blur for shapes, images, and text, including shadows, with PNG/SVG export.
• Contour glow — colored light around frame, shape, text, and image outlines, including holes, with adjustable radius, edge width, intensity, and alpha threshold. PNG follows the export scale; SVG embeds the light at 1× and retains the vector artwork.
• Background blur — blur behind frames, rectangles, ellipses, and images, clipped to their rotated outlines and rounded corners. PNG follows the export scale; SVG embeds the blurred background at 1× while retaining vector foregrounds. Converting a primitive to a path removes its background blur; undo restores both.
• Images and video — media import, image fills, non-destructive cropping, and video playback.
• Interactive preview — connect layers to frames or component variants on canvas, with independent click and hover actions for each variant. Playback supports frame navigation, going back, and switching individual instances without changing the document. Leaving a hovered element can restore the previous frame and variant state, keep the current state, or switch to an existing component variant.
• Local and self-hosted workspaces — personal and team spaces, document and library synchronization, and version-conflict comparison.
• Export — .rovar documents, PNG, and SVG.
• Desktop and Web — a shared GPUI interface, English and Simplified Chinese; Web support is experimental.

• Visual effects — glass and mixed effect stacks.
• Animation — keyframes, easing, animated gradients, and layer effects.
• Advanced interactions — additional triggers, overlays, scrollable areas, and transitions.
• Presentation sharing — standalone playback and browser sharing through a self-hosted server.
• AI-assisted design — natural-language generation, selection editing, layout refinement, and previews of editable results.
• GPUI DSL export — layouts, styles, components, and assets for GPUI applications.

Open Prototype in the right panel, choose a starting frame, and select a layer. Choose On click or On hover, then drag its connection handle to a frame or another main variant in the same component set. You can also choose the destination or Go back from the panel; choose No action to remove the selected trigger's action. Each variant has its own interactions. Press Present beside the inspector tabs to play; press Esc to return to editing.

cargo run --locked -p rovar

Install just and Nushell. Run just to list all build commands.

just build-linux       # Desktop binary
just build-linux-rpm   # RPM package
just build-macos       # App, ZIP and DMG
just build-windows     # Installer and portable ZIP
just build-server      # Server with the Web editor embedded

Packages are written to dist/. macOS builds require Apple Silicon and Xcode Command Line Tools; see macOS packaging. Windows packaging requires x64 MSVC, 7-Zip and Inno Setup; see Windows packaging.

The Web editor is experimental. Open your server's address in a browser that supports WebGPU, using HTTPS or localhost.

Building the Web editor requires Trunk and the Rust wasm32-unknown-unknown target. See server setup for deployment and registration settings.

Issues and pull requests are welcome! Feel free to report bugs, suggest features, discuss design improvements, or contribute code and documentation.

File format · MIT License