As claimed on its website, "Skencil is implemented almost completely in Python, a very high-level, object oriented, interpreted language, with the rest written in C for speed".
On 19 June 2005, Skencil 0.6.17 was released. It has versions compatible with Linux on the i386, DEC Alpha, m68k, PowerPC and SPARC architectures, with FreeBSD, with Solaris, with IRIX64 6.4, and with AIX. Since then development have been frozen and, as a result, its packages have been removed from Linux distributions repositories.[9]
Revitalization
On 19 November 2006, Reiter and Herzog asked Ihor Novikov, sK1 Project lead developer, to join Skencil development.[10][11]
On 31 October 2010, Skencil 1.0 alpha was released, as a result of revitalization work done by sK1 Project team that made it possible to use Skencil on 64-bit hardware and modern OS at the time.[9][12][13] Source and binary packages for various Linux distributions has been published on sK1 Project's page on code.google.com, where it now archived.[14][15]
On 4 November 2016, Skencil 1.0 rc1 was released and the last code changes committed on 7 February 2020 on sK1 Project's page on GitHub.[16] There are no binary packages for this release.
Future plans had included porting the user interface from Tk/Tkinter to GTK+, a multiple document interface, and multi-font, fully integrated multiline text, patterns fills instead of solid color, etc.[17]
^Reiter, Bernhard (19 November 2006). "[Skencil-users] Join forces for skencil1/sK1? (was: sK1)". Retrieved 2023-11-03. I have chatted a bit with Bernhard (Herzog) and my idea was: Why not join forces on a tcl/tk based Skencil1/sK1 development? Bernhard's initial reaction was quite positive.