Drawing tools
The 73 drawing tools Chart Engine ships across eight categories, how magnet and lock behave, and why drawings are saved per symbol while indicators are not.
The drawing toolbar runs down the left edge of the chart. It holds 73 tools in eight categories, and every one of them is drawn by the chart itself onto the same canvas as the candles. Each drawing is anchored to a time and a price, not to a pixel position, so it stays where you put it when you pan, zoom or change timeframe.
The eight categories
Trend line, ray, extended line, arrow, info line, trend angle, horizontal line, horizontal ray, vertical line, cross line, parallel channel, disjoint channel, regression trend, flat top/bottom, anchored VWAP.
The channel tools take three points: two to set the base line and a third to set the width. Anchored VWAP is a line tool rather than an indicator because you place its anchor by hand.
Retracement, extension, fan, arcs, circles, spiral, time zones, channel, wedge.
Retracement and extension are the two you will use daily; the rest exist because traders who want them cannot substitute anything else. Their level ladders are resolved at draw time, so they follow the site theme — see below.
Andrews' pitchfork, Schiff pitchfork, modified Schiff, inside pitchfork. All three-point tools.
Gann box, Gann fan, Gann square, Gann square (fixed).
Rectangle, ellipse, triangle, arc, polygon, polyline, brush, highlighter.
Brush and highlighter are continuous: hold the button and drag, and the tool collects points until you release.
Head and shoulders, double top, double bottom, triangle, wedge, flag, ABCD, Elliott wave.
These are hand-drawn pattern scaffolds — you place the pivots. Automatic detection is a different feature; see Chart panels.
Text, note, anchored note, callout, balloon, signpost, price label, badge, flag marker, arrow marker, icon marker, emoji marker.
Text tools open an inline editor on the canvas. Press Esc to finish
editing.
Price range, date range, date and price range, ruler, angle measure, percent change, bars pattern, forecast, price projection, time projection, risk/reward, long position, short position.
Long position, short position and risk/reward draw a target and stop box against an entry, with the ratio calculated for you. They are analysis tools — nothing here places an order.
Drawing something
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Pick a tool from the toolbar. Categories expand; the tool stays armed until it has enough points.
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Click to place each point. Every tool declares how many it needs — one for a horizontal line, two for a trend line, three for a pitchfork or a channel. Continuous tools such as brush collect points while you drag.
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Press
Escto abandon a half-finished drawing. Nothing is saved until the tool has its full point count. -
The tool disarms itself when the drawing completes, and the cursor returns. That is deliberate: an armed tool that stays armed turns every subsequent click into another drawing.
Once a drawing exists, select it to move it, drag its handles to reshape it, or delete it. Cursor and crosshair at the top of the toolbar are selection modes, not drawing tools — switching to either one disarms whatever was active.
Magnet, undo and clear
Three controls at the bottom of the toolbar act on drawings rather than creating them:
- Magnet mode snaps the point you are placing to the nearest candle value, so a support line lands exactly on a wick rather than one pixel above it. It is on by default — turn it off when you want a level that does not sit on a bar.
- Undo and Redo step back and forward through the drawings on the current chart. Both grey out when there is nothing to step to.
- Remove all drawings clears the current symbol at once. It asks for confirmation first, and it is disabled when there is nothing to clear.
The toolbar prints M, L, Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y next to these controls. No
keyboard handler is bound to any of them — the chart is driven with the mouse,
touch and the toolbar. Esc is the only key the chart actually listens for.
Where drawings are stored
Drawings save under a key that includes the symbol, so BTC/USDT's trend lines do not appear on ETH/USDT. Indicators do the opposite — one global list for the whole app. This asymmetry is intentional and it is the thing people get wrong when they expect a workspace to be one object.
Both live in the browser's local storage, on that device only. Nothing is synchronised to the server, nothing follows the account to another machine, and clearing site data deletes them.
The save is automatic and immediate. Creating, editing or deleting a drawing rewrites the whole set for that symbol, so there is no "save" button and no way to lose work by navigating away. Deleting the last drawing on a symbol removes the key entirely rather than storing an empty list.
If you want a reusable arrangement rather than per-symbol marks, use chart templates, which capture indicators, drawings, chart type and timeframe together and can be applied to any market.
Fibonacci colours follow the theme
Fibonacci drawings used to write their complete level-colour ladder into their own saved state. Any drawing made before that changed would have kept the old palette permanently while everything around it moved on.
Defaults are now resolved when the drawing is painted, and only colours a user explicitly picked are stored. Existing drawings follow the theme like new ones.
The ladder itself was also rebuilt. It used to be a fourteen-hue rainbow in which two levels shared a colour and nothing indicated which way the ladder ran. It is now two sequential lightness ramps with the 0 and 1 anchors on neutral ink, so the ordering survives colour-vision deficiency — and it no longer borrows the candles' own up and down colours, which mean something else on a price chart.
Limits and gotchas
Drawings are anchored to time and price, not to pixels. Pan far enough away and a drawing leaves the viewport entirely — it has not been deleted. Use Reset view in the toolbar to jump back to the current time.
Drawings are stored against the symbol, not the timeframe, so a trend line drawn on 5m is still there on 1h. It will look different, because the same two anchor points span a different number of candles.
The chart is driven with the mouse, touch and the toolbar. Esc cancels the
in-progress drawing and closes any open overlay panel; nothing else is bound,
including the shortcut hints printed on the toolbar buttons.
It clears the current symbol's drawings only, after a confirmation prompt. Take a screenshot from the toolbar first if the analysis matters.
Long position, short position and risk/reward look like order tickets and are not. They draw a target and stop box against an entry and calculate the ratio. Placing the trade is the order form's job.
Next
- Chart panels — automatic pattern detection, alerts, replay and templates.
- Indicators — the other analysis surface, and the different storage rules it follows.