Improved Shape Editing and More in Sketch 43

After introducing a couple big features in Sketch 42, we’ve used this release to focus on the smaller improvements and ‘under the hood’ changes that’ll make for some exciting updates in the future. That said, we’ve still found the time to introduce a cool change to shape editing that we hope you’ll love. Here’s a quick overview of the key updates Sketch 43 introduces:

• Improved shape editing to speed up your workflow
• We’re retiring legacy plugins, so they’ll no longer work
• Over 40 other improvements and bug fixes, including an update to Mirror, a new file format and changes to nested symbol overrides

Improved shape editing

Chances are, you spend a lot of your time creating and editing shapes in Sketch, so we’re always looking for ways to make it better. Up until now, selecting a vector point of a shape would show you its handle control points. That’s helpful, but those handle control points aren’t the only ones that have an effect here.

With Sketch 43, clicking on a vector point will not only show you its handle control points, but also the handle control points from the adjacent vector points in the path. It’s a small improvement, but we think it will make a big difference to the speed of your shape editing.

Saying goodbye to legacy plugins

Single-file plugins will no longer work in Sketch 43. We’ve filed these under ‘legacy plugins’ for a while now, so you might already know if this affects you. If it does, you’ll want to get in touch with the developer behind the plugin(s) you use and ask for an update.

A new file format

With this release, we’ve introduced a new Sketch file format, which means documents created with Sketch 43 will not be compatible with previous versions.

Over 40 changes, improvements and bug fixes

As ever, we’ve made a number of smaller improvements to Sketch based on your feedback, as well as a few bug fixes. Here are the highlights:

• Nested Symbol overrides are now presented in alphabetical order to make your Symbols easier to find
• In the vector editor, the Zoom to Selection command now zooms to the vector point selection, rather than the layer selection
• When a shape has only a shadow, the fill area will not be clipped when the layer’s opacity is reduced (to get that effect now, you’ll need give the shape a transparent fill)
• A cleaner SVG export when using inner and outer borders
• Mirror has been updated to better handle large Artboards
• A host of other updates and bug fixes, including improvements to SVG exports and tweaks to the Touch Bar interface

You can find a full list of improvements and bug fixes on the updates page of the Sketch website.

Sketch 43 is a free update for all paid users. As ever, we’d love to know what you think of it. If you’ve got questions or feedback, you can get in touch with us via our support page or join in the conversation on Twitter. We’ll be back soon with news about Sketch 44.