Open-source drawing tool – Excalidraw | Hacker News Reader

Open-source drawing tool – Excalidraw

github.com

184 pointsdmezzetti37 comments

Just want to chime in and say this is one of the best tools, I have this permanently pinned in Arc and it makes it really, really easy to collaborate.

Some more dots:

- free, open source, encrypted and private

- I hated this at first because the shortcuts weren’t intuitive. IMO shortcuts are the #1 most important feature of a whiteboarding tool because you never want the interface to be a process step. This has improved drastically and it’s best in class now!

- very stable and widely used for systems design interviews, basically every startup is on this now and even Meta uses this white-labelled for their interviews

- the easy collaboration and easy jump in (going to their homepage opens up a whiteboard) makes this an ideal pair for new-age tools like Arc

- the scribbly design style humanizes system design and makes it seem lower stakes, IMO makes a big difference in my process

- seems to have a small footprint, I’ve used this on airplane wifi before without latency

I like excalidraw for live discussions but if I want to make more detailed or better looking diagrams, I really enjoy these two tools:

- For drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG, I really like DrawIO. They have a web version https://app.diagrams.net/ but I strongly recommend the desktop version https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases/

- For text-as-diagram, I think Mermaid wins this by default since GitHub added markdown support for these: https://mermaid.live/ (This was github's announcement https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil... )

kroki.io maintains a collection of text to image tool. niolesk is a great frontend for kroki.

Love plantuml as my goto for diagram-aa-code.Yesterday I learnt about d2lang. It looks better as a language. Nothing beats TiKZ when it comes to look of diagram.

I agree. Excalidraw is good for very rough sketches and live drawing, but Draw.io is better for basically everything else.

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608336

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525648

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034119

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101381

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Show HN: Excalideck – Use Excalidraw to make slides - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139581 - Nov 2021 (24 comments)

Why is Excalidraw so good? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109995 - Nov 2021 (267 comments)

Excalidraw+ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034119 - May 2021 (31 comments)

Show HN: Eraser — Excalidraw-based visual meeting canvas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26330288 - March 2021 (8 comments)

Show HN: It was fun generating version distributions charts for Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792169 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)

One Year of Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608336 - Jan 2021 (19 comments)

Show HN: Create a Slideshow with Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081914 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)

Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525648 - June 2020 (54 comments)

Building Excalidraw's P2P Collaboration Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719576 - March 2020 (1 comment)

End-to-end encryption in the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663435 - March 2020 (107 comments)

End-to-End Encryption in the Browser and how we did it in Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22655009 - March 2020 (4 comments)

Show HN: Excalidraw – Sketch Hand-Drawn Like Diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146973 - Jan 2020 (6 comments)

Excalidraw – a whiteboard tool to sketch hand-drawn diagrams (excalidraw.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22104502 - Jan 2020 (3 comments)

Excalidraw – a whiteboard tool that lets you sketch hand-drawn diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101381 - Jan 2020 (21 comments)

Lately I've been finding tldraw.com a better tool. I hope they don't mess up the tool with changes to the license.

Nice, thanks for sharing. I love Excalidraw but tldraw [0] (which I assume is a play on "tldr"?) seems just as good if not a tiny bit better in some small ways at first glance. There's also an Obsidian plugin, though it is still in beta [1].

Very happy to see more options in this space. Draw.io is still usually my default for "official" drag-and-drop diagrams, but these tools fill a much-needed gap (in the remote-first world) where physical whiteboards used to be, and lower the barrier for quicker diagrams and ad-hoc discussions.

[0] https://www.tldraw.com/ [1] https://github.com/holxsam/tldraw-in-obsidian

Love the tool, been using it for several years now for live whiteboarding. A self-hosted version integrates really well with org-mode through org-excalidraw witg kroki-cli used for svg rendering

Same. I've also used it for quite a few larger pieces of work in the last few years and was very happy with it.

The handdrawn-looking but still tidy diagrams really give a 100+ page document a more approachable feel when used consistently than other more "sterile" diagrams.

My office is predominantly WFH. I’ve found that Excalidraw spans the divide between collaborative white boarding and traditional diagramming effortlessly.

I can do back-of-the-napkin drawing sessions with my peers in realtime and flip that into c4, UML, and Balsamiq-style wire framing with very little effort, and little friction when pulling in both local team members and outside contributors. You can get a hell of a lot of mileage out of the free/oss offerings, but if you use it consistently with a small team Plus is a slam dunk. My office has fought tooth and nail over collaborative tools like this for years and got little traction, when I threw Excalidraw at ‘em it was like brandy on an infant’s gums: instant pacification and desired effect. I feel a little embarrassed fawning over it but it’s real fucking good.

The excalidraw plugin is one of the best in Obsidian. Very good for note-taking

One of the apps that acknowledges hotkeys are paramount to quick productive diagram making sessions.

It doesn't have a command palette though, which has always surprised me...

I love Excalidraw before I switched over to an iPad Pro I was using it to do the illustrations for my book https://www.networksfromscratch.com/

What do you use now, on iPad for drawing?

Vectornator that they renamed Linearity curve.

I'm constantly DM'd at work about how I'm able to create the "cool drawings" in my blog/wiki posts, and I enthusiastically point to excalidraw.com.

I have a background in vector illustration, which is all about creating subpixel-perfect designs. I'm also a bit of a perfectionist, which I think a lot of people here can relate to. I mention this because the reason Excalidraw really works for me is that it frees me from worrying about design. When you literally can't create something that looks "perfect", you're freed up to just sketch your idea without worrying about the visual representation.

Google Cloud made an architecture diagram tool based on this

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioner...

Would have been nice to see the Google logo under the Sponsors list of Excalidraw, eh, Google?

Would also have been nice their page even spelled it correctly... currently it says "Exclaidraw project"

Excalidraw is awesome. Also, if you're into Obsidian (local filesystem markdown superpowers) its Excalidraw integration is fantastic. Drawings in your notes, notes in your drawings, whatever you want, however you want it.

This tool is absolutely fantastic. I’ve used it for years and makes communication and thinking so much easier. I know that really applies to any diagraming tool but excalidraw is particularly simple with a non-existent barrier of entry.

I love Excalidraw but I feel like at some point recently the text inside a box aligns to the grid separately to the box it’s in. The effect being that drawing a box, writing in it then dragging it around breaks the alignment

It’s still functional but my brain hates it

Huh? Are you sure you aren't accidentally adding a separate text box? I do this sometimes when I double-click the empty space in the center of a box intending to edit the text. I've found it's better to double-click the border of the box to reliably guarantee that I'm actually editing the box itself rather than a new separate text element.

I didn't think so but maybe! I'll be more careful and see if I can figure out what I'm doing wrong

i love this product and at one point wrote down why https://offbyone.us/posts/why-is-excalidraw-so-good/

For those using Obsidian, the Excalidraw plugin plays really well within it.

https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

It's a great tool. I've used it to design all my documentation for txtai.

https://github.com/neuml/txtai

I have to agree this a a great tool. I had low expectations, but I found it easy to use and the AI diagram generator actually worked on my experiments.

Excalidraw is excellent! I wonder if the paid app is funding one or more (or not even one) developers or not.

Can this tool import JSON files to create diagrams, like tree or flow diagrams?

Looks awesome! There is a way to install it as a Windows app and run locally?

VS Code has a great Excalidraw plugin, as does Obsidian

Was used for Facebook interviews until a year or so ago.

Honestly Excalidraw got me back into being motivated to create more diagrams in my documentation.

draw.io is a pain in ass at times and it's just not "fun" to use like Excalidraw is.

Highly recommend trying it out if you haven't - you can also self-host.

Excalidraw itself is also pretty cool as an embeddable widget, we recently built a cool real-time AI-accelerated drawing playground [1] (source [2]) and the experience was super fun!

[1]: https://fal.ai/dynamic [2]: https://gist.github.com/turbo1912/9f553287e64250790ac53baa03...

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