Is there any simple vector drawing application that can let me make rough sketches with arbitrary units?
For example, I want to be able to draw a rectangle that is exactly 2’6 x 12".
If I scale it by 50% it should be 15" x 6". I want to be able to measure distances. I don’t want to keep track of a scale/conversion/ratio in my head, that’s a perfect job for computer.
In the old Sketchup software (RIP) you could type the measurements in while drawing or manipulating objects. It was extremely fast and intuitive. I don’t need 3d modelling; it was just a great UI.
All I can find is CAD and it is way overkill. Not gonna design a cotton gin or a circuit board. I just want to make a simple floor plan to see if the furniture would fit the way I want to arrange it. Or estimate material requirements for projects.
Desired features: Layers, customizable/smart keyboard shortcuts, colors, rectangle circle lines, transform/scale/skew/rotate, group/lock objects, rulers grids guide snapping.
anything?
Agree although surprisingly the About section is a little vague on some of what OP wanted.
OP, it’s an SVG editor so should be perfect for real world projects you allude to. You can set the canvas size and change the default units with relative ease; Pixels, points, millimetres and inches but also Parsecs if you want to go wild, and as it’s SVG it’ll scale as needed without issue. https://logosbynick.com/change-the-canvas-size-in-inkscape/
There are also measurement tools too and areas can be calculated (but objects do need to be converted to paths to measure areas).
Everything else is covered in the about.
To be clear you can absolutely type in exact measurements in the ‘tool controls bar’ for all the shape tools and even individual nodes. Scale and units are easy to switch between and there’s a measurement tool also.
Free cad in 2d mode
+1 for inkscape. The learning curve can be bad, but there’s enough documentation out there you could easily ask an AI “how do I do x in inkscape” and get pretty good instructions
Maybe https://graphite.rs/?
you mentioned CAD was a bit too much for what you are looking for; however, there is a simple code-only cad program that makes simple tasks like making a shape super easy: openscad
example:
Circle(17);
makes a 17mm radius circle.
For furniture/house design, there is Sweet Home 3D. Otherwise, Blender can work for most of your desired features. Though both have 3D features that would be overkill, but they’re not that intensive for basic tasks as you ask.
I personally use Blender to sketch things out. It has the Grease Pencil for 2d work and it has pretty decent systems for measuring. There’s even an add-on called MeasureIt, which allows you to add notations to dimensions.
