Boxy SVG
A Mac vector editor built around the SVG format itself—so icons, UI assets, and web illustrations stay editable as real SVG rather than locked proprietary files.
Jarosław Foksa’s Boxy SVG aims at designers and front-end developers who want something between a browser demo and a full Adobe suite. The interface borrows familiar patterns from Inkscape, Sketch, and Illustrator: on-canvas geometry and transform handles, paint controls, manual and smart guides, grids, path boolean ops (unite, intersect, subtract, exclude), and arrangement tools for align, rotate, flip, order, and group. You save SVG or compressed SVGZ and export PNG, JPEG, WebP, PDF, or HTML5. Pixabay integration supplies stock photos and vectors; Google Fonts covers typography without hunting local font files. Over a hundred commands can be rebound to custom shortcuts.
Why developers keep it on the Mac
Rendering runs on a Chromium-based engine, so what you see is close to Chrome’s SVG behavior. An inspector similar to browser DevTools exposes SVG and CSS for selected nodes. Output tends to preserve IDs, classes, titles, and other metadata instead of aggressively rewriting the markup—useful when the file will land in a codebase or sprite sheet. Sprite editing is a first-class workflow. The Mac App Store edition is a one-time $19.99 purchase with Family Sharing for up to six members; the privacy label states that no data is collected. Requirements are macOS 12.0 or later; the store build is about 155 MB and ships in English plus twenty other languages. A free online demo on the project site lets you evaluate before buying.
It is not a replacement for Illustrator’s print pipelines or Affinity’s multi-format document model. Complex brand systems, CMYK print packaging, or heavy bitmap compositing still belong elsewhere. For web icons, logo cleanup, SVG sprites, and quick path surgery on Mac, Boxy stays lightweight and SVG-honest.
Version 4.111.0
Release 4.111.0 adds the OpenMoji emoji library for quicker iconography drafts, a Color space option when exporting PNG or JPEG (including linear sRGB among the choices in the export UI), and a fix for the Join paths command that previously failed. Cross-platform notes for the same version also fix Export-panel preview and export of documents that use Google Fonts on Firefox—relevant if you share projects across desktop and web builds of Boxy. Install 4.111.0 if you need OpenMoji in the library pane or color-managed raster exports from SVG artwork.
