Drawbridge

Welcome

Drawbridge is a network diagram editor. It exists to make network documentation quick enough to draw that it actually gets kept up to date: you place devices, drag cables between them, and the app takes care of the tidy orthogonal routing, the spacing and the styling.

This manual ships inside the app. It works offline, it describes the version you are running, and you can reach it any time with F1.

Your first diagram in five minutes

  1. Place a device. Press D — or Device in the tool dock along the bottom — and the device picker opens where the pointer is: type Firewall, Switch, Server, and press Enter. In Classic, click a shape in the left-hand palette and then the canvas, or drag the shape straight out of the palette. See Shapes.
  2. Name it. Double-click the device and type. Enter commits.
  3. Cable it. Hover a device and drag from one of the four handles on its sides onto another device — or press C for the Cable tool. The connector routes itself around whatever is in the way. See Connectors.
  4. Say what the link is. With the connector selected, pick a Link type (IPsec, trunk, LAG, WAN, management, wireless, conduit, fieldbus, HA) and a Speed from the two dropdowns in the panel on the right. The type is the line style, the speed is the colour.
  5. Tidy it. Select several devices and use Align to line them up and space them evenly. Nothing needs hand-nudging.
  6. Ship it. Export ▾ gives you SVG, PNG, a PDF with a title block — or PDF with schedules, the handover pack that prints the cable schedule and the inventory after the drawing — a self-contained HTML viewer, a Visio file, or the image straight on your clipboard. See Exporting.

Everything is undoable with ⌘/Ctrl Z, and your work is snapshotted locally as you go — closing the window by accident does not lose anything.

How the app is laid out

Drawbridge opens in Studio: an app bar across the top with the document's name and menu, the Draw, Tables, Checks and Pack views, Import, Export, Share and the ☰ app menu; the pages down the left; the tool dock floating along the bottom of the drawing; and on the right the Facts panel for whatever is selected, with its Facts, Cables and Look tabs. Region by region, with the six themes it comes in: Layouts: Classic and Studio.

Classic, the layout Drawbridge has always had, is one click away — ☰ → Layout → Classic — and stays your layout on this device once chosen. It is laid out like this:

The ideas worth knowing up front

Routes are derived, not drawn. An Auto connector has no stored geometry: the router re-solves the whole page whenever anything moves. That is why cables shift when you move an unrelated device — and why you never have to clean up cabling by hand. If you want a path that never changes, set that connector to Direct or Custom.

Two channels on every link. The link type carries what the connection is (dash pattern and badge); the speed carries how fast (colour). They compose, and the Legend button builds a key from whatever the page actually uses.

Containers contain by geometry, groups by membership. A zone or rack carries whatever stands on it, however you move it. A group carries its members wherever they are. One object can be detached from a container it stands in, so it stays put while the container moves.

One good default over a setting. There is no styling panel. Tile fill, outline colour, fonts and spacing come from the design tokens so a large diagram stays calm and consistent; what you can set is what carries meaning — kind, label, colour, link type, speed. The two exceptions are questions about the whole drawing rather than about one object, and both live in Document info: how big the writing is (Text scale) and how heavy the lines are (Line weight — Fine, Normal or Bold).

Your files stay yours. Drawbridge reads and writes .drawio (and Visio .vsdx), locally. There is no account, no telemetry, and nothing is uploaded. See Settings, desktop and privacy.

Free to use, at home or at work. Use Drawbridge for anything, commercially, for as long as you like, without paying and without asking. Copy it, share it, run it on your own servers. The one thing the licence does not allow is using Drawbridge to build a product that competes with it. The full terms are on the licenses page, and the name and logo are trademarks — a fork is welcome, under its own name.

Where to go next