Hew v1.0.0

Hew v1.0 - The "Rock Solid" Release

It's 1.0. Hew is a real, use-it-every-day 3D modeler now — and it's free, open source, and runs everywhere: macOS, Windows, Linux, and any modern browser with no account and no reduced "web tier."

If you learned to model in SketchUp, you already know how to use Hew. Draw on a face, push/pull it into shape, inference-snap everything, mostly the same keyboard shortcuts — your muscle memory just works. The difference is underneath: every push/pull is a discrete, watertight solid, so nothing welds to a neighbor because you forgot to group it, nothing goes hollow because a face or the wrong line got deleted, and Union/Subtract/Intersect only run when you say so. It's "Select All → Make Group" as the data model instead of a necessary habit.

What you actually get

Here's the short version of what's in the box:

• The SketchUp moves — lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, polygons; push/pull; Follow Me for moldings, spheres, and goblets; Offset, Slice, Move/Rotate/Scale with copy arrays.
• Solids that stay solid — watertight objects, real booleans, curves that stay true circles under their facets.
• Precision — type exact sizes mid-gesture, tape measure and protractor, dimensions and leader text, real 3D text, measure-and-rescale.
• Organization — nested groups, components that edit once and update everywhere, tags with per-tag visibility, saved Scenes, an Outliner on every platform (including the free web app), and the Library above.
• Paper and the shop — print at an exact drawing scale on any platform, tile a 1:1 template across pages with trim marks, export true-vector SVG and PDF, a cut-list page, and Shop Mode that puts the model on any phone via a QR code — with View in AR on iPhone and iPad.
• Files that are yours — an open, documented .hew format; imports SketchUp 2017 .skp, glTF, COLLADA, and STL; exports glTF, STL, 3MF, USDZ, and SVG.
• Scriptable — a full API and an MCP server, so you can drive Hew from the command line or hand the keys to an AI agent.

Why 1.0, why now

Hew started because the venerable SketchUp Make 2017 isn't going to work the next time I update my OS and the free SketchUp web app doesn't support the Outliner (hard requirement for me)... and I wasn't willing to give up on just-shy of 20 years of SketchUp muscle memory. So I built the tool I wanted: the good parts of SketchUp, improved where they could be, given away free and open, and running everywhere — with no account, no subscription, and no reduced tier waiting to upsell you.

That tool is here. It's 1.0. Go make something.

For those following along, what finally tipped the releases into 1.0 territory? Read on:

The Library, now in your browser

The personal Library — your own components, materials, and whole models, each an ordinary .hew file — used to be a desktop-only feature. Not anymore. Open https://app.hew3d.com, save a chair, and it's there next time. It lives in the browser's own storage, so there's nothing to set up.

And if you're on Chrome, Edge, or Brave, you can do one better: point the Library at a real folder on disk. Now it's the same plain .hew files the desktop app uses — put that folder in Dropbox, NextCloud, or iCloud Drive and your Library follows you between machines, with no Hew account and no Hew server in the middle. Bring your own cloud. The web app really is the full modeler now, Library and all.

Menus that finally make sense

The menus grew feature by feature and it showed. So they got a proper pass: one clean, HIG-shaped layout that's identical on every platform. Object commands (Group, Make Component, the booleans) live in their own Object menu instead of cluttering Edit. Panels moved to View, where showing and hiding things belongs. Draw and Tools are grouped by what you're actually doing. The old "Axes" tool is now "Drawing Axes" so it stops colliding with the View ▸ Axes toggle, and Help ▸ Search finds any command by name. It's all small stuff, but it's the kind of small stuff you work with every day, so it needed to be better.

Solid as Gibraltar

A 1.0 has to be dependable, so before shipping it I went looking for trouble — an exhaustive security and correctness audit across the whole stack: the kernel, the importers, the self-hostable relay, the desktop shell, and the browser build. The bugs it turned up are fixed and pinned with tests: a malformed model can't overflow the importer or slip a bad number past the kernel, two browser tabs can't stomp on each other's crash-recovery snapshot, booleans on imported geometry stop refusing themselves, and a group that holds a component instance now moves the whole thing. It's all stuff you'll never see — which is exactly the point.

What's Next?

The 1.0 release is the "everybody can use it" release, but that doesn't mean it's done. See docs/ROADMAP.md for what's coming next. And if you have any specific requests, let me know!

Downloads

The download page picks the right build
for your system, or grab a file directly:

Platform	x64 / Intel	ARM64 / Apple Silicon
macOS — disk image	universal .dmg	universal .dmg
Windows — installer	.exe	.exe
Linux — AppImage	.AppImage	.AppImage
Linux — Debian/Ubuntu	.deb	.deb
Linux — Fedora/openSUSE	.rpm	.rpm
Web — self-hosting tarball	.tar.gz	.tar.gz
Relay — self-hosted Open on Phone (Linux)	.tar.gz	.tar.gz

• The macOS disk image is signed and notarized; one universal app
  covers Apple Silicon and Intel.
• Windows installers are not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may
  warn on first run — choose More info, then Run anyway.
• On Linux, mark the AppImage executable (chmod +x) before
  first run, or install the .deb/.rpm.
• Desktop builds update themselves; latest.json and the
  .sig assets serve that built-in updater and are not meant
  for manual download.
• Or skip installing entirely: Hew runs in the browser at
  app.hew3d.com.
• Self-hosting the web app, and the optional relay that makes
  Open on Phone work against your own server, is documented in
  docs/SELF_HOSTING.md.