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Comment by agrafix | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug: I’ve built https://board.new to help with ad-hoc collaborative whiteboarding. One thing I’ve found using more sophisticated tools was that folks spent too much time making it look nice vs discussing the content. Hence this tool that doesn’t distract with that.

That said, mermaid looks pretty nice —- going to try that out for my design documents once settled on an approach.

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I love this. It's so easy to use and works great on a trackpad. I'm going to start using it in my meetings.

Nice job!

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EDIT: After playing with it for a bit, I have some feedback :)

- Sometimes, I accidentally press Z instead of shift, or vice versa. I would love to have undo! Backspace or delete hotkey would be perfect.

- For selecting colors, it would be great to just be able to press 1,2,3,4 (rather than cycling through).

- I often forget what color I have selected. Perhaps the cursor could be colored to indicate this?

- When typing text, my first instinct was to use the arrow keys to move the cursor around, but this doesn't work. Also, it's hard to select where the cursor should go to edit.

- The shift and Z hotkeys are great. But I don't quite understand selecting the tools. If I can just hold down Z to erase, why would I ever select the eraser tool? It seems like the most efficient approach is to only ever have the text tool selected, so that at any time I can click to create text, but otherwise I use Z/shift to draw.

> I would love to have undo!

not sure if they added this literally in the last 18 hours, but the usual CMD+Z undo shortcut seems to work for me.

Wow, I just tried it and absolutely love how you put the option to draw by holding shift instead of holding down a mouse/trackpad click. I've hated to draw on the trackpad because it has been so hard to click and draw at the same time.

Where did you get the idea for this? Do you know if a similar function exists in any other drawing application, like Illustrator/Photoshop/GIMP/Inkscape?

Ooo, solved my own problem.

MacOS has an option for "mouse keys" where one can toggle the keyboard to act as the directional control and click control for a mouse. So if I toggle it on, then I can use the "i" key to act as a mouse click and draw on the trackpad, and "m" key to hold a mouse click until I click "." to release it. And then I can toggle the mouse keys on/off by hitting the option key 5 times.

Woohoo!

I'm curious, is something like Shift to draw patentable?

I just tried using this, and it was completely unusable. It was constantly operating in the wrong mode, the z/shift keyboard shortcuts would do the wrong thing most of the time (the only time they seemed to possibly work properly was when in text mode, except that then they’re doing something for text mode as well), colour switching normally didn’t work, when I start drawing lines it first draws one segment from some arbitrary location (probably a point on the last line or some arbitrary earlier-drawn line).

There are clearly some very serious logic and mode bugs present.

I’m using Firefox on Windows, and tried it with mouse, pen and touch.

Two small things:

- It interrupted my drawing-by-holding-LMB twice with the "just use shift" popup. Didn't happen again though.

- The "tip" of the text tool is not where drawing begins when I press shift. This is the result of placing the text cursor tip dead center on the top of the bottom line and then pressing shift to draw upwards: https://i.imgur.com/RKoiyar.png

Firefox 84.0, private mode.

Oooh thanks for sharing. I really appreciate the simple keyboard layout, and that I can jump in without signup and sharing a link is very simple.

Pretty cool! If you are drawing and go off the edge of the screen, when you come back it doesn't let you draw again unless you lift up on the mouse button and press it back down again. Using the shift key was much less reliable than the mouse button.

Nice! Would be better if one could, a) scroll to increase canvas-space and b) zoom out to step back a bit and take a look at the whole drawing.

Shift to draw blows my mind.

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