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 :
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 :-)
Excalidraw can store the files, although it's a little hidden: the link option in export gives a link that downloads an encrypted JSON from their server.
When using the stylus, it doesn't support pressure sensitivity (I just tried with my Wacom). I created doodledocs.com as a side project, which does support it (and almost doesn't support anything else :P).
The code is open source and also purely front-end based. So the Excalidraw authors can see how it could be implemented. It's basically Bresenham's algorithm combined with the DOM API.
> 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”:
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.)
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.
Some of these tools do exactly that. I draw my gross arcs, lines, ovals, rectangles and it renders much nicer ones, that feels like someone with way better motor skills had drawn it. I know Freehand does that.
I should probably look again. When I went through various tablet tools a few years back I didn't see anything that really did it for me. But I should probably take another look.
> In general, don’t whiteboard sketches have a hand-drawn feel?
Whiteboard sketches on a physical whiteboard do, but in general, computer “whiteboard” sketches are a mixed bag that IMO land more often on the side of straight lines and perfect circles, especially if you look around at which computer whiteboard products are commercially successful.
> Seems like the trick would be a tool to give diagramming tools a hand-draw whiteboard sketch feel, or take hand-drawn whiteboard sketches and give them a diagramming feel.
The latter, converting sketches to diagrams, would be neat and is an interesting & difficult problem.
The thing that neither of these use-cases really cover is the need for a fast iteration / ideation tool in the exact same role as a physical whiteboard. Once you’re concerned about the presentation & look, the majority of time is spent working on the layout and the presentation because it takes longer to make it pretty than to just work out or communicate an idea without regard to beauty. Very small changes to where something goes or what it looks like can lead to a large and time-consuming ‘refactor’ of a diagram.
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/. 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.
Hopefully a better answer than mine comes along, but until then I tried several different options with my wacom and Miro was the best (far from perfect tho). I'm a wacom n00b and am still learning how to finely tune pressure sensitivity for myself, but for collaboration I liked Miro. It's free for small use and works well across mobile and web.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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)
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.
- 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.
https://youtu.be/fix2-SynPGE