
Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel - dragonsh
https://github.com/excalidraw
======
paulgb
I enjoyed this recent talk from its creator:

[https://youtu.be/fix2-SynPGE](https://youtu.be/fix2-SynPGE)

~~~
jroseman93
Nice, thanks for sharing.

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lovasoa
Excalidraw is pretty cool, but its main drawback is that is has no backend.
The drawings cannot be persisted to the server, and you cannot collaborate
with someone on a drawing unless you are both connected at the same time.

I maintain another opensource whiteboard web application that has a slightly
different set of features, but allows persisting drawings to the server. It's
called WBO :

\- [https://wbo.ophir.dev/](https://wbo.ophir.dev/)

~~~
odux
The public whiteboard is very interesting. It is a nice way to showcase
collaborating capabilities. It would have been a great messy canvas except for
that one user or bot determined to erase everything someone else draws :-)

~~~
airstrike
A few of us managed to collaborate a bit... Not really going to change the
world but it was fun while it lasted
[https://i.stack.imgur.com/rV8gQ.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rV8gQ.png)

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ohsonice
Cool! I found it a little unintuitive that after each stroke, it reset to the
pointer tool. I would've expected to be able to draw more lines without
pressing 'X' each time.

Also, as a mathematician, I would love some Unicode support for greek letters
and super/sub-scripts. Something similar to
[https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-
input/](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/). I tried to
just draw the text I wanted but the first point I brought up made this more
difficult.

ETA: If you hold 'X' or '7' then it remains in the tool you chose. This makes
sense.

~~~
peterhunt
there's also a lock icon that keeps the tool selected which i think is the
behavior you want

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Terretta
> _Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that
> have a hand-drawn feel to them_

In general, don’t whiteboard sketches have a hand-drawn feel?

Seems like the trick would be a tool to give diagramming tools a hand-drawn
whiteboard sketch feel, or take hand-drawn whiteboard sketches and give them a
diagramming feel.

Could be neat to put this engine behind e.g. graphviz/dot, for instance, a la
“sketch viz”:

[https://sketchviz.com/new](https://sketchviz.com/new)

Or for the real parlor trick, emit a literally hand drawn whiteboard sketch in
dot!

PS. Many contributions to graphviz needed:

[https://graphviz.gitlab.io/doc/todo.html](https://graphviz.gitlab.io/doc/todo.html)

~~~
ghaff
Nirvana for me is a tool that takes my really sloppy sketches and writing and
converts it to something that looks like an actual sketch artist drew it.
Maybe pick different styles. No idea how one would go about doing that though.

(TBH, it would probably be a case of it being better to just hire an artist.)

~~~
pc86
Do people still use dribbble? If you can find a style there you like I'm
willing to bet it would be more affordable than you'd think.

I've always been surprised by the affordability of one-off graphic requests
like these.

~~~
ghaff
I'm not surprised. And I have a couple people at work who I could always ask
for a favor for a given project. There's just a certain amount of friction
with bringing a person in; it's not so much about the cost.

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golem14
Neat!

I wonder if there is a way to modify something like xfig to output in hand
drawn "look".

Collaborative editing is of course also very good and tools like xfig don't
have it.

I guess I'm wondering aloud if it makes sense to see "hand drawn look",
collaborative editing and cloud storage/saas as orthogonal issues.

~~~
golem14
Eg would be great to add 'hand drawn look' to other tools like graphviz
without having to hugely modify the underlying tool, e.g. graphviz.

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monkeydust
Got this hosted on my own server using DigitalOcean and CapRover (from another
HN post) works great.

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aaronharnly
Is there any API or method for pressure sensitive pens/tablets to work on the
web? Or any native apps that support pressure and work with online apps?

I love my Wacom and I love collaborative whiteboards, but it feels like
neither is at its full potential.

~~~
mkl
PointerEvents: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_eve...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_events)

They are pretty easy to use, but most online whiteboards don't bother. Perhaps
the developers don't have suitable hardware?

The only pressure sensitive one I've seen is
[https://github.com/melvinroest/doodledocs](https://github.com/melvinroest/doodledocs),
which is ... not very polished yet.

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renke1
It's also embeddable [0]. I can imagine a few use cases where that's useful.

[0]: [https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-
embed](https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-embed)

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zwischenzug
I found the default font has the problematic side-effect that when shared
through a zoom/google meet type platform, the 'handwriting' becomes illegible.
This has annoyed me a lot at $company, which uses it widely.

~~~
xixixao
You should file an issue on the repo - folks working on it are super open to
contributions.

~~~
jilles
Totally! I was annoyed by the default 'jump back to selection' so I created a
PR to lock that (with the little lock on the right). It took about 10 minutes
after PR approval to merge to production. Really nice.

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guerby
A few weeks ago excalidraw was using google for storage, see:

[https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-
json/issues/76](https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-json/issues/76) "I
also wonder, why is this using google cloud ? Could this be used without
google cloud (and without sending data -- even if encrypted) to them ?"

I don't know if there is now a fully self-hosted version of excalidraw.

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airstrike
Make an iPad version and I'll pay $4.99 for it

~~~
vjeux
It works on ipad. Feel free to donate $5 :)

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rvivek
Love excalidraw! This might seem like a plug but someone asked for a
collaborative embed. We actually integrated theirs in our pair programming
solution for system design interviews:
[https://www.hackerrank.com/products/codepair](https://www.hackerrank.com/products/codepair)

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dmix
This is neat.

One bit of feedback: I found the default and even "extra bold" stroke size way
to small. White boards have that imperfect broad strokes feel to them, having
tiny lines, especially as the default just doesn't connect well with it IMO.

Otherwise the interface is very easy to use, I like the draggable and editable
objects approach

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guerby
One missing feature: import an image to ease workflow with other tools.

[https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/19](https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/issues/19)

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EwanToo
This blog post on their multi-user support is pretty interesting

[https://blog.excalidraw.com/building-
excalidraw-p2p-collabor...](https://blog.excalidraw.com/building-
excalidraw-p2p-collaboration-feature/)

~~~
GrumpyNl
They are describing the Github problem.

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knbknb
Anyone knows if there is someting similar available, but for uploading and
editing Screenshots ?

I'd like to have features "crop", "pixelize" and "add sequential-number label"
available in a brwoser-based picture editor.

~~~
xixixao
I imagine this could be added to excalidraw. I also had a use case for
inserting images and drawing over them.

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tangoalpha
Stumbled upon this tool when it was linked from a recent HN post (Six levels
of interaction with a system). Have been using this ever since.

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sandGorgon
this is brilliant. thank you so much for creating this.

this also has end-to-end encryption built in. I think it should be the default
and no hidden in a hard-to-find section.

I wish it would export in the Mermaid format - [https://mermaid-
js.github.io/mermaid/#/](https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/)

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njessop
started using this 1 month ago - now is my go-to. only things annoying (other
than no-cloud backend as people note) is that the naming convention is a
little funky (but once you get a file named it persists to img outputs as
well).

Lowers the bar for diagrams. And keyboard shortcuts super handy too.

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KennyCason
I really love this! My only complaint is having the brush reset to pointer
after each stroke.

~~~
KennyCason
I also noticed that when I place text in the box, as I type the text expands
out to the left and out of the box due to centering. My expectation was that
the text would start from where my cursor is, and go to the right. (like in
powerpoint or slides)

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Axsuul
Can anyone recommend a Sketch plugin that can achieve this same type of style?

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jonpurdy
For quick sketches during sprint planning meetings or design sessions, I
started using Witeboard.com a couple of years ago but have been experimenting
with Excalidraw for the past two months.

TL;DR: I still tend to use Witeboard.com for quick sketches, but if I plan on
doing something more complicated and not time-sensitive I use Excalidraw.

What I like about Witeboard.com:

\- fast to load and easy to get started

\- quick keys (t: typing, p: pencil)

\- pencil modifier keys: hold down l to switch from free drawing to drawing a
line, or r to draw a rectangle

Dislike about Witeboard.com:

\- It's like MS Paint, once the pixels are drawn you can't move them around
(despite being vectors (I assume, infinitely zoomable))

What I like about Excalidraw:

\- Can move shapes around (fixes biggest gripe with Witeboard.com)

\- Sloppiness levels: Artist is what I use and is PERFECT for my needs, but
nice to have options for other users

\- Also has quick keys (8: typing, 7: pencil)

\- Exports editable drawing as a file, not saved in cloud. So you can just
import that file again and not rely on saving the URL.

Dislike about Excalidraw:

\- Preventing me from switching to it: once a tool (ie. pencil) is used for a
stroke, it reverts back to mouse cursor (I'd rather have it stay as pencil and
hit 1 for it to switch to a cursor)

\- Majorly annoying: the open/save/color/stroke palette in top left is too
similar to a square ratio, so it blocks a corner of the image

If those two dislikes were fixed, I'd likely switch to it fulltime. For both
products, I'd easily pay a few bucks a month for them.

~~~
filipn

      - Preventing me from switching to it: once a tool (ie. pencil) is used for a stroke, it reverts back to mouse cursor (I'd rather have it stay as pencil and hit 1 for it to switch to a cursor)
    

There is a little lock icon next to the drawing tools which enables you to
lock a tool, so it won't revert back.

~~~
jilles
Fun fact: I added this to Excalidraw for this exact reason! It was super
annoying.

~~~
jonpurdy
Ah thanks, I’ll give this a try!

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baristaGeek
We use this when we need to design. It's amazing.

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sbkg0002
Does anyone have a Helm chart to run this in k8s?

