Vara is a drawing and digital painting application with pressure-sensitive brushes.
Vara aims to support non-artificial works, while still supporting a digital workflow. This is why many features like the shape tools, copy-paste, cloning and filters are avoided. If you need such features, there are applications like GIMP.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- User interface – brush presets, quick palette, and keyboard shortcuts.
- Undo/redo support, clear layer.
- Tools – pencil, brush, erase, eyedropper (colour picker), and a basic bucket fill.
- Dynamics – pressure-for-size, and stroke smoothing.
- Foreground and background layers.
- Layer visibility – 100%, 50% and 0% for foreground, on/off for background.
- Viewport – zoom with buttons, zoom by scrolling, navigation with scrollbars, quick buttons for 100% zoom and centering.
- Export image or layer to PNG.
- Scratchpad mode – turns the current document into a sandbox, letting you experiment with brushes and colours directly on the main canvas without making permanent changes. When the mode is exit, all changes are automatically undone.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux and Windows.
Website: nandakumar.co.in/software/vara
Support:
Developer: Nandakumar Edamana
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Vara is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
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|---|---|
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| Textual Paint | MS Paint in your terminal |
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| BlockPaint | Terminal-based painting tool |
| KolourPaint | Easy-to-use paint program by KDE |
| Alchemy | Non-orthodox painting tool experimenting with alternative ways of drawing |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

