Cam IncollFieldwalker's design editor provides 12 permaculture-specific tools with keyboard shortcuts, full undo/redo, and context menus — built for the kind of focused, iterative workflow that site design demands.
A design tool should stay out of your way. When you're thinking about where a swale goes, you shouldn't be hunting for a button. When you want to try a different paddock layout, you shouldn't need four clicks and a menu to move a fence line. The speed of the tool should match the speed of your thinking.
That's the principle behind the Fieldwalker editor. And we've just finished a significant rebuild of how the whole thing works.
What changed
The editor now uses a floating toolbar with 12 tools organised into three groups. Everything you need for permaculture design is visible and accessible without opening panels or navigating menus.
The tools are what you'd expect: trees, garden beds, swales, fences, zones, water features, paths, buildings, pins, areas, text labels. Each one exists because permaculture designers need it. There are no generic "rectangle" or "ellipse" tools — every tool produces a design element that means something in the context of a site plan.
Some tools have variants. Fences, for example, come in post-and-rail and electric tape variants. Trees have individual tree, dead tree, and dense vegetation options. You access variants by holding a click on the tool for a moment — a small flyout appears with the options. Or you can press the keyboard shortcut repeatedly to cycle through variants.
Keyboard-first
Every tool has a keyboard shortcut. Press a number key and you're immediately in that tool. Press it again and it cycles to the next variant. This sounds like a small thing, but it transforms the design experience.
Without keyboard shortcuts, the workflow is: think about what to place, move your mouse to the toolbar, find the right tool, click it, move back to the canvas, place the element. With shortcuts, it's: think about what to place, press a key, place the element. The gap between thinking and doing closes.
For iterative design work — and permaculture design is fundamentally iterative — that speed matters. You try a fence layout. You step back and look at it. You press a key to switch to the swale tool, place a swale along the contour, switch back to fences, adjust the paddock boundary. The whole process flows because you're not constantly interrupting your thinking to operate the interface.
Undo, redo, and the freedom to experiment
The editor now has full undo and redo. Every action — placing an element, moving it, resizing it, changing a property, deleting it, reordering layers — can be undone and redone.
This might seem like a basic feature, but it changes how you design. Without undo, every placement is a commitment. You think twice before trying something. You play it safe. With undo, you experiment freely. Place the swale here. No — undo. Try it there. Better. What if the garden bed was larger? Try it. Undo. Try something else.
Experimentation is how good designs happen. The observe-reflect-iterate cycle that permaculture is built on requires the freedom to try things and change your mind. Undo/redo makes that frictionless.
Right-click and context
Right-click any element on the canvas and a context menu appears. Edit its properties, duplicate it, delete it, change its layer order — all without leaving the canvas or opening a sidebar panel.
This matters for the kind of small adjustments that add up during design work. You're looking at a tree placement and you want to move it behind a building in the layer order. Right-click, send backward. Done. You want a copy of a garden bed to try in a different location. Right-click, duplicate. Drag it into position.
The principle is that the most common operations should be available where you're already looking — on the canvas, in context, without navigating away.
Placement that feels natural
When you select a tool, your cursor changes to show you're in placement mode. Click the canvas and the element appears. If you click on an existing element instead, the tool steps aside and selects that element — so you're never accidentally placing a new tree on top of an old one when you meant to select it.
Click the same tool button again and it deactivates — you're back to selection mode. It's a small interaction detail, but it means you always feel in control. Place when you want to place. Select when you want to select. The tool reads your intent rather than forcing you through a modal workflow.
Why this matters for permaculture design
Permaculture design is iterative by nature. You observe, you design, you reflect, you redesign. A design that starts with swales along every contour might end up with swales on only two contours once you've considered the access routes. A fence layout that looks good on paper might not work once you overlay it with the water infrastructure.
This kind of iterative refinement only happens if the tool is fast enough to keep up. If adjusting a design takes as long as creating it, you do fewer iterations. If it's quick — move a fence, undo, try again, switch tools, add a swale, step back, adjust — the design gets better because you explore more options.
The editor is built for that rhythm. Fast tool switching. Fast placement. Full undo. Context menus where you need them. Keyboard shortcuts for everything.
Because the best design tool is the one you stop noticing while you're designing.