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Comment by rovek | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited about this. I've used Excalidraw as a simple, lo-fi interviewing tool at a few companies for when we want candidates to draw something without having too many tools to get bogged down in making a masterpiece. For me it really hits the sweet spot between being fast and flexible like a whiteboard while still working well for computer input (i.e. doesn't make you free draw with a mouse).

It might be worth adding a toggle to the marketing website alongside dark mode to switch the handwriting font to something more readable though

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Excalidraw is horrible for this purpose! Don't use it!

There are at least 2 huge issues.

1. The biggest issue, it does not propagate selections so the interviewee selects something to highlight what they are talking about but doesn't realize that the indication the object is selected does not appear on the interviewer's version of the document. It makes talking about your diagram nearly impossible.

Google Slides doesn't have this problem

https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/3314

2. Excalidraw has this horrible design where placing a shape actually places 2 objects, a shape object and a text object. You type some text and then try to move the "labeled object" and only one of them moves. This is different than every drawing program in existence for the last ~35 years and is a bad UX

I'd even argue the whole concept is bad. You ask some dev to interview and expect them to use unfamiliar illustration software where while they're interviewing they get to struggle with learning new quirky software.

nice tool but I'm a fan of draw.io, opensource and can be downloaded to your machine to run locally if wanted.

This appears to be open source also, and runnable locally: https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

There's a docker image also: https://hub.docker.com/r/excalidraw/excalidraw

It's hard to tell exactly, but it sounds like the "plus" version would just have more collaboration functionality.

I had no idea that draw.io had a desktop version. Cool.

Meh... I was once being interviewed and the company offered to use Excalidraw. My experience with the tool was subpar. If you want something truly amazing, check out Whimsical Flowcharts. It's an order of magnitude better than Excalidraw.

> Meh...

> tool was subpar

What were there actual issues that you faced?

Kind of rude to put it down with vague comments and recommend something else.

Wow. Downvotes. Sure. Here are just a few off the top of my head.

1. Excalidraw doesn't allow you to quickly connect components.

2. It doesn't _always_ allow you to double-click on a component and add a title to it, so you end up using a Text component, which is obviously not what you want because two of the components are not linked.

3. You can't title links/arrows between components.

4. It's cool that they have a components library, but it's barely useful (right now), so I would either make it really good or drop entirely.

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