
Explore the future of Sketch
Download the latest Mac app beta to check out new features and improvements before anyone else.

Before you download the beta
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Create backup copies of your documents before you open them. Our pre-release beta builds can be unstable.
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Let your team know you’re using the beta — documents opened in this build may become incompatible with stable release builds.
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You’ll need to be an Editor in a Workspace to use the beta.
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This Mac app beta requires macOS Monterey (12.0.0) or newer.
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To send feedback or report a bug, simply click on the Feedback button in the Mac app’s toolbar, or contact us using our support form.
Just like our stable release, you’ll get updates for every new version.
Release notes
Sketch 97 (173139) was released on
Requires macOS Monterey (12.0.0) or newer
What’s new
- Selection Improvements For this release, we’ve spent some time focusing on selection — and improving all the little interactions that might bug you or feel inconsistent. We’ve listed all the individual changes and improvements below, but it should feel easier and more predictable to select layers by clicking on their visible parts and move layers by dragging within their selection box.
- Collections We heard your requests for another level of organization inside your Workspace, and with this release we’re introducing just that. With Collections, you can group documents inside of Projects in just about any way that suits you and your collaborators. Ever found the number of Projects in your Workspace a little unmanageable? Having trouble sorting through loads of documents in a Project? Collections can help. You can create a new Collection from the new save dialog, and organize existing documents and Collections in the Workspace window.
- Redesigned Save Dialog We’ve completely redesigned the Save dialog for Workspace documents, with a better experience for organizing documents and full support for the new Collections feature. This is now the default way to save in Sketch. You can still save locally to your Mac via the “Save to Your Mac” button in the Save dialog, or via File > Save to Your Mac. You can also change the default save location and dialog under the General tab in Sketch’s Settings.
- Multi-Layer Renaming You can now select multiple layers and use Edit > Rename (⌘R) to rename your entire selection, with support for modifier tokens and optional matching of portions of the layers’ names. You can also use Edit > Rename All (⌥⌘R) to rename all the layers on your current page, with the option to filter for specific layers to rename. Finally, you can quickly rename another selection of layers using the last renaming pattern you used via Edit > Rename with Last Format (⌥⇧⌘R).
What’s improved
- We’re continuing to improve on our experimental feature — Smart Layout in groups. This update brings support for duplicating and adding new layers to groups, as well as Smart Layout for Artboards. Learn how to enable it, if you haven’t already, and head over to the community forum for a full list of changes.
- You can now use File > Save with Description (⌃⌘S) to add a description and Star when you save a version of a document you’re working on. Descriptions give everyone a quick way to see what’s changed when browsing a document’s version history in the web app, while Stars control a version’s visibility to Viewers (or, if it’s a Library document, whether the changes trigger a Library update).
- You can now create a rectangular marquee selection on the Canvas by pressing X and drawing your marquee. This makes it easier to make a selection on top of a layer (such as a background layer) without selecting the layer itself.
- Right/secondary-clicking on overlapping layers, while holding ⇧, will now bring up a quick layer selection menu. You can hover over each item in the menu to see a highlight around that layer on the Canvas, making it even easier to select a layer hidden below another.
- We’ve tidied up SVG exports so they include fewer unnecessary digits within any fractional values.
- You can now press and hold ⌥⌘ before or after you start dragging a marquee to select layers that are fully enclosed within the bounds of another layer. Holding ⌥⌘ when you have already selected layers has a different effect and will move the selected layers, even if your cursor is not positioned over them.
- You can now ⌘-click on an Artboard’s background/empty space to select it, even if it already contains layers.
- We’ve improved performance in a few different areas in this release; when you switch between particularly complex pages in documents, for documents with large gradients and blurs, and for shadow spreading on oval shapes.
- When you’ve selected a nested Symbol or layer inside another Symbol, you can now use Edit > Select > Select Containing Symbol (⌘ Esc) to select the parent Symbol.
- You can now right/secondary-click anywhere within a layer’s selection box, and not just on the layer itself, to bring up the contextual menu. This works even if the layer you’ve selected is not the frontmost layer.
- You can now ⌘-click on a selected layer within a multi-layer selection to exclusively select that layer and deselect all of the others.
- You can now click inside a hollow shape (one with a border, but no fills) that you’ve already selected to select a layer behind it. This does not affect dragging a selected shape, which can happen within that shape’s hollow area.
- When you are aligning multi-selections, you can now use Artboards as a reference object.
- When you select a locked layer via the Layer List, you can now move, resize and rotate it, just like any other layer. Making a selection on the Canvas won’t pick up any locked layers, which saves you from making accidental edits.
What’s changed
- Invision legacy DSM plugin version 1.1.50 has been marked as incompatible with Sketch 97.
- Sympli Handoff plugin version 1.4.2 has been marked as incompatible with Sketch 97.
- We’ve removed the ability to ⌥-click to select an obscured layer. Instead, you can now right/secondary click while holding ⇧ to bring up a quick layer selection menu. This also fixes some issues where holding ⌥ and hovering over layers would not show measurements correctly.
- You can no longer click on empty space within a Group to select it. This way, you can be sure that you’ll always select directly under your cursor, so long as that layer is unlocked, without unexpectedly selecting a Group’s empty space in front of it. This does not affect dragging a Group you’ve already selected.
- With this update, we no longer support macOS Big Sur. We now support macOS Monterey or newer. You can continue to use version 96.3 of Sketch with Big Sur, or upgrade to a new version of macOS.
- When you duplicate layers with ⌥-drag, releasing ⌥ simultaneously or slightly before releasing your mouse (or trackpad) will now still duplicate the layers instead of moving them.
- You can now drag a selection of layers by clicking and dragging on any empty space within the outer selection box, and not just on the layers themselves. This is especially helpful if you’re dragging many small layers or shapes with borders but no fills. If you want to select an unselected layer within that area, though, you can still do that.
What’s fixed
- Fixes an issue where ⌘-clicking through the empty area of a Symbol would only select text or Symbol layers behind it. Now, it will correctly select any type of layer.
- Fixes an issue where rearranging an unselected layer with Smart Distribute could add it to the current selection, instead of exclusively selecting it.
- Fixes a bug that could stop you from exporting very large PDF and EPS files.
- Fixes a bug that caused export previews in the Inspector to render in full resolution and not as a preview.
- Fixes a bug that caused blurs for very large layers to use lots of system memory.
- Fixes a bug that could clip Artboard backgrounds incorrectly when you copied and pasted multiple Artboards — within Sketch or to another app.
- Fixes a bug that wrongly indicated that you could set/unset a layer within a multi-layer selection as reference object when you hovered over the empty space within the individual layer’s selection box. To set/unset a reference object within a multi-layer selection, you need to click on a solid part of the layer, and this fix makes that more obvious.
- Fixes a bug that meant shapes with a border but no fill would have a selection hit area that was unnecessarily large on the inside of the shape, making it harder to select layers behind them.
- Fixes a bug that made it impossible to select a shape with both a fill and border by clicking on its border.
- Fixes a bug where Paste Over and Paste Here would not paste in the correct position if you had selected an Artboard.
- Fixes a bug which caused open paths to disappear when you converted them to outlines.
- Fixes a bug that caused Symbols belonging to a deactivated Library to not appear in the Symbol menu in the Inspector, even if they were present in the current document.
- Fixes a bug that stopped the selection highlight from hiding when you adjusted a layer’s corner properties, making it harder to see those all-important corners.
- Fixes a bug that meant resizing Sketch’s window with the Components View active would not shrink the expanded search bar, but instead hide other toolbar icons.
- Fixes a bug that made it impossible to rotate a layer on the Canvas by 180º in some cases.