CADCraft

An AutoCAD-style command line, rebuilt as open source

Anyone who learned drafting in AutoCAD will recognise the workflow. The command line offers prompts with clickable keywords, history, AutoComplete and aliases, and accepts coordinates as x,y, relative @dx,dy or distance and angle. Enter, Space or a right-click repeats the last command. The repository lists what works today:

• Drawing and editing: lines, polylines, circles, arcs, ellipses, splines, text and multi-line text, plus move, copy, rotate, scale, mirror, stretch, offset, trim, extend, fillet, chamfer and arrays.
• Precision: a full set of object snaps, polar tracking, ortho and grid snap.
• Annotation: associative dimensions that follow the geometry, multileaders, tables and hatching with islands.
• Layouts: paper space with scaled viewports, page setups and plotting to PDF.
• Parametric constraints: geometric and dimensional constraints that re-solve after each edit.

Built so an AI agent can draw and check its own work

The project’s main idea is that each menu item, tool and prompt is a command. The bundled cadcraft-cli can run as an MCP server, either headless or connected to the open app so you can watch an agent work. Its MCP tools let an assistant such as Claude type at the command line, run any command with JSON, query the entities in a drawing and render a PNG of the result, so the agent can look at what it drew before carrying on. The same CLI converts DWG and DXF files to SVG or PNG in batch jobs, which suits build pipelines more than casual users.

Note that CADCraft has no built-in AI model of its own. The AI part comes from the agent you connect to it.

Files, platforms and Arabic text

DXF is read from R12 to 2018 and written as R2000. DWG files from R13 to 2018 open through an open-source library and save as R2000. Exports cover PDF, SVG and PNG. There are builds for Windows (including ARM), macOS (universal), Linux (Flatpak, AppImage, .deb, .rpm), FreeBSD, and a WebAssembly version that you host yourself. The official project does not run a hosted online app.

Arabic is one of the interface languages, provided an Arabic font is installed. Drawing text is laid out right to left with proper letter joining, which matters for room labels and title blocks in Arabic.

Limits to know before you switch

The README labels the project as early development. Entities that CADCraft does not model yet are dropped when you save a file, so a complex DWG from a colleague can lose detail on a round trip. SHX fonts are not read yet. The working feature set is 2D drafting; there is no 3D modelling to replace AutoCAD for solid work, and there is no vendor support desk, only the ArtCraft Discord. For students, makers and anyone who wants to script drawings or let an agent produce them, those limits matter less than the price, which is zero, under the MIT or Apache-2.0 licence.