Roxel

A lightweight, open-source voxel editor for desktop. Simple to learn, fun to use, and nice to look at.

Features

• Brush, erase, recolor, eyedrop, shape, select, and move tools on an open-world 3D voxel grid — paint anywhere on X / Z and as high as memory allows; the floor at y = 0 is the only hard boundary
• Shape tool: rectangle, ellipse, line — 2D on the active build plane or extruded into a 3D box / cylinder / line; long-press the shape rail button for a primitive picker, hold Shift while dragging the footprint to lock aspect (square / circle / 45° line)
• Select tool: drag a 3D AABB on a face plane, then bulk delete / recolor inside it
• Move tool: drag a selected voxel along the picked face plane or arrow-key nudge; click a bare voxel with no selection to move just that voxel
• Shift+click line draw between the last placed voxel and the cursor
• Built-in palettes (Sweetie 16, PICO-8, DawnBringer 16/32, Endesga 32, NA16, Basic) plus user palettes with add/new/duplicate/rename/delete and drag-to-reorder
• Orbit / pan / zoom camera with isometric default angle
• Save / load .rox project files (RON), with a 10-entry Open Recent menu
• Import MagicaVoxel .vox, Qubicle .qb, and Goxel .gox
• Export to MagicaVoxel .vox, Goxel .gox, Wavefront .obj, glTF .glb (Unity / Godot ready), transparent .png, and .svg
• Import / export Adobe Swatch Exchange .ase palettes
• In-app toast notifications for save / load / import / export results
• Light / Dark / System themes with separate canvas and floor color preferences, plus optional Minecraft-style floor grid lines and a permanent RGB axis triad at world origin
• Canvas-first UI: a single left inspector with floating tool island and (on Win/Linux) a top-center menu pill, all hideable for focus mode

Install

Prebuilt Roxel.app (macOS) and Roxel.exe (Windows) are attached to each GitHub Release.

Warning

macOS builds are self-signed and not notarized. Gatekeeper will block first launch — either as "unidentified developer" or, on recent macOS versions, as "damaged and can't be opened" (the quarantine attribute set on downloaded files). To bypass:

1. Right-click Roxel.app → Open → confirm in the dialog.

2. If macOS still refuses with the "damaged" message, strip the quarantine attribute:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Roxel.app

Windows builds are unsigned; SmartScreen will warn on first run — click More info → Run anyway.

Run

cargo run --release

Dev profile uses opt-level = 1 for the crate and opt-level = 3 for deps to keep iteration fast.

Controls

Key	Action
B	Brush
E	Erase
P	Paint (recolor existing voxel)
I	Eyedropper
S	Shape (rect / ellipse / line; 2D or extruded)
M	Select (drag a 3D AABB on a face plane)
V	Move (drag a selected voxel; click bare voxel for ad-hoc move)
Alt (hold)	Temporary eyedropper; releases back to previous tool
Shift + click	Draw a 3D line from the last placed voxel to the cursor
← / → / ↑ / ↓	Nudge selection 1 voxel on X / Z (Move tool)
Shift + ↑ / ↓	Nudge selection 1 voxel on Y (Move tool)
Shift + drag	Lock Move drag to the same horizontal plane
Backspace / Delete	Clear voxels inside the active selection
Space + left-drag	Pan (Figma/Photoshop style)
Z + left-click	Zoom in 2× toward target
Alt + Z + left-click	Zoom out 2×
Cmd/Ctrl + =	Zoom in 2×
Cmd/Ctrl + -	Zoom out 2×
Cmd/Ctrl + 0	Frame view on the voxel cluster (panel-aware)
Cmd/Ctrl + Z	Undo
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Z	Redo
`	Focus mode — toggle inspector + floating chrome

Left mouse drag in the viewport applies the current tool. Right mouse drag orbits the camera. Scroll to zoom.

Packaging a macOS .app

cargo install cargo-bundle
cargo bundle --release
open target/release/bundle/osx/Roxel.app

The bundle picks up assets/icons/roxel.icns via [package.metadata.bundle] in Cargo.toml.

Releases

Tagged versions trigger a GitHub Actions workflow that builds and uploads Roxel.app (macOS) and Roxel.exe (Windows) to a GitHub Release.

To cut a release:

# bump version in Cargo.toml, commit
git tag v0.3.1
git push origin v0.3.1

The workflow lives at .github/workflows/release.yml. See Install for first-run bypass on unsigned macOS / Windows builds.

File format

.rox projects are RON-serialized. Open-world: only occupied cells are stored, no fixed grid size, coordinates are signed so models can sit at any position relative to the origin.

struct ProjectFile {
    voxels: Vec<([i32; 3], Color8)>,
}

License

MIT — see LICENSE.