CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

squig is a small project with a specific taste. Pull requests are welcome, and so is opening an issue first if you're about to spend real time on something — a five-minute conversation beats a rejected branch.

Getting set up

pnpm install
pnpm dev

That's the whole setup. No environment variables, no database, no accounts — documents live in the browser's own storage.

Before you push:

pnpm lint
pnpm test     # type-checks, then runs the geometry, selection and clipboard suites
pnpm build

All three should be green before you open a pull request.

The easiest thing to contribute

A component. The library is just data: a ComponentDef whose render() returns drawing primitives, added to an array. lib/library/AUTHORING.md walks through it, and /kitchen-sink renders every def at its default size and again squeezed, so you can see a bad layout without dragging a hundred things onto a canvas.

Good candidates: anything in the shadcn/ui vocabulary that's missing, and blocks or templates for screens people actually draw.

What tends to get merged

It looks drawn, not rendered. Everything on the canvas goes through rough.js. The exception is icons, which are drawn crisp — at 14px the wobble just reads as mush.

It matches Figma's keyboard. If Figma has a shortcut for it, squig uses the same one. Muscle memory is the feature.

It stays low fidelity on purpose. squig is a napkin for working out ideas, not a mockup tool. Features that push toward pixel-precision — gradients, shadows, exact color pickers — are usually the wrong direction, because the whole point is that nothing looks decided yet.

It doesn't add a backend. No accounts, no sync, no cloud. Files stay in the browser.

Style

Match the file you're in. A few conventions worth knowing:

• Comments explain why, not what. Most of the codebase's comments are there because a decision would look arbitrary otherwise — keep that bar.
• Components never render to DOM. They return primitives the canvas draws.
• Geometry and selection logic lives in lib/ and is testable without React. If you're writing math, add a case to scripts/test-geometry.ts or scripts/test-selection.ts.

Reporting bugs

Include what you drew, what you expected, and what happened. A .squig file exported with ⇧⌘S is the fastest possible repro.