Beta 1.2 is out

Sketch with intent.
Change your mind freely.

Start messy. End perfect. Drift handles everything in between, and never asks you to commit too early.

Windows · macOS · Browser · Now in beta

Drift's window: a dimensioned mounting plate, the tool bar on the left and the Inspector on the right

What's in it

The precision of CAD, the pace of a sketch

Drift borrows constraint sketching from mechanical CAD and makes it quick enough for early design: plans, sections, details, joinery, signage and fabrication drawings.

Dimensions that drive the drawing

Smart dimensions read what you click: lengths, angles, radii, distances. Type a new value and the geometry follows. Blue means still free; white means fully defined.

Relations at a flick

Hold Q and flick towards horizontal, tangent, equal or symmetric. Drift adds the obvious ones as you draw, and refuses ones that would over-define the sketch, with a reason.

Parameters and variants

Name a value, width = 1200, and drive dimensions with expressions. Drag a slider to watch the sketch re-solve, and keep named variants to compare options side by side.

Views on the canvas

Crop named views of the model right on the canvas, Revit-style, and place them on sheets. Each view picks its layers and its own dimensions and notes; section and elevation marks link to the views they cut.

Poché, hatches and fills

Click inside a closed area to hatch it: concrete, earth, insulation, brick, or any AutoCAD or Revit .pat file. Fills stay on their outlines through every edit.

Blocks and a furniture library

Doors, windows, fixtures and furniture to drop in, or make blocks of your own. Edit one and every copy updates. DXF blocks come across both ways.

Sheets, title blocks and output

Lay views out on A4 to A0 or ANSI sheets with a title block and revisions. Export true-scale vector PDF, SVG or DXF, and trace over PDF and DXF underlays.

Colour, greyscale or black & white

Choose per sheet how it prints: in colour, in greys, or as a crisp monochrome plot. The sheet preview shows exactly what comes out.

Draw with AI

drift-mcp lets Claude and other MCP assistants sketch, constrain, dimension, render and analyse Drift drawings: live, in the drawing you have open, or from a short Drift script.

Beta 1.2 is out

What's new in Beta 1.2

Beta 1.2 is here. Here's what's new.

  • Assistants in your open drawing

    Turn on the live link and Claude and other MCP assistants work on the drawing open in Drift. Watch each change as it happens, undo it, or keep drawing yourself.

  • Drift script

    Describe a drawing by intent: rooms, walls, doors, windows, grids and hatches, by name. Drift builds it in one step you can undo.

  • Notes for some views only

    Dimensions and notes can appear in just the views they belong to, like a note meant only for a detail, as in Revit.

  • Project title blocks

    Set the project's name, number, client and address once, and every sheet's title block shows them, with an architectural layout and a status for each sheet.

  • Steadier fillets

    Sketches with filleted corners keep their shape while you drag them.

  • Crops at a keystroke

    Shift+Alt+B shows or hides view crops, and crops snap while you drag them.

Feels familiar

Keys you already know

Drift is made for people who already draw in Revit, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, Illustrator or Affinity. Units can be millimetres or feet-and-inches with fractions, typed any way you like: 1'-6 1/2", 450mm,=width/2.

The pen draws like Illustrator's. G moves and R rotates, Blender-style, with X and Y to lock an axis. Ctrl/⌘+K finds every command.

Coming from another program →
  • FastSketches of thousands of entities solve in milliseconds, on the GPU-drawn canvas.
  • ExactLines, arcs and text stay crisp at any zoom, and files keep every number exactly.
  • Plays well with othersDXF in and out, plus SVG, PDF and Illustrator import, as geometry or as an underlay to trace.
  • YoursPlain-text .drift files that diff in git. No account, nothing in the cloud.

No install

Try Drift in your browser

The full app runs in the browser with WebGPU, or WebGL2 on older browsers. Your work is kept in the browser between visits, and you can download it as a .drift file.

Open Drift

Download

Get the beta

Drift is in beta for Windows and macOS, and runs in your browser too. About the licence.