23 ms·

Why is Excalidraw so good?

738 points by zekenie 5y ago

T3RMINATED 5y ago
Balsamiq is better
kazinator 5y ago
> There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product. You mean like pretty much every single darned productivity program before year 200X? It's sad that this even has to be an issue.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  Also no install though.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    Ah, but this business of being prompted to create an account also afflicts software that requires installation.
  - kavalg 5y ago
    they do have a docker image (no collaboration though)
  - remus 5y ago
    It's actually a pretty good example of a PWA which can be installed (depending on whether your platform supports it, works well with chrome and windows, sorta works on iOS but more fiddly. Havent tried firefox).
    - Vinnl 5y ago
      It can be, but I was mostly trying to list a benefit that the "good old" apps didn't have, i.e. not needing to install it. That said, I'd also misunderstood the grandparent comment: they meant that it's a shame that Excalidraw is one of the few apps nowadays that have these features, even if the other ones also have advantages like not requiring an install.
- jamil7 5y ago
  No annoying drip emails “checking in” every few days.
  - jesterson 5y ago
    "Hey, I know you are super busy but I just wanted to check..." Makes me want to ditch the product on the spot. Yes, I've seen your emails. Yes, I will let you know if I need anything. No, I don't need a zoom call/onboarding video/introductory convo with your marketing team.
    - ballenf 5y ago
      Ditching the product is probably the goal of the email, if the stats show that paid adoption happens within x days 98% of the time. What I think those stats miss is that I will test a product with one email and if I decide to buy for a team will use a new account. So it looks like the conversion happened immediately skewing their sales/marketing strategy.
- sytelus 5y ago
  Yes, but they also don’t have to run series rounds, forced to grow 50% YoY, exit in 5 years and retire before they turn 30.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Not sure what you are comparing this against? --- First of all it's a free, open tool, MIT license, that is also hosted for free. It loads instantly without an installation step. You just type in the URL and it works. It's not a "productivity program" specifically as illustrated in the article. The design is very simple, intuitive and deliberately minimalist, while it does quite a bunch of subtle things under the hood that harmonize with the overall goal of the program. --- Now there may have been tools kind of like this in the 90's. Not aware of any of them from the top of my head.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    I assume kazinator means: In Office 95, you click the Excel icon and it opens to a blank document with no login or registration or anything like that. As did drawing software, 3D modelling software, and so on. Of course, arguably one did have to pay for it and install it - but that was a one-off thing.
    - samstave 5y ago
      Dear god - anyone here have to setup licensing servers for high-end 3D software from the past, like Softimage or Alias|Wavefront - those were a bitch, and if you lost connection to the licensing server, you couldnt run the program.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Excalidraw is akin to dia, but on the web. Also, it's more targeted and polished it seems, and that's nice.
    - BjoernKW 5y ago
      People might be seeing this through slightly rose-tinted glasses. Yes, you could use Excel 95 by just double-clicking on an icon. However, not only did you have to buy and install the software, which back in the day often meant going to an actual brick-and-mortar store to purchase a shrink-wrapped box labelled "Office 95", but it even required buying a specific type of computer with a specific operating system first. In this specific case, that doesn't even take into account Microsoft's shady tactics of strong-arming vendors and OEMs into exclusively shipping Microsoft software with their products. So, arguably, the barrier to entry still was a lot higher than with even the most obnoxious growth hacking tactics we see in many SaaS products today. That said, I absolutely love the way Excalidraw are "onboarding" users. It's just worth remembering that not everything went downhill with SaaS products (in fact, quite the opposite) and not everything was better "back in the day".
- OneTimePetes 5y ago
  Google and Co really dragged this industry into the mudpit.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    You mean that the companies making insane margins and paying top compensation are exactly the ones responsible for most of this this since they're massively profiting from monetizing consumers through various dark patterns, ads and spying? Shocking! Who would have thought? /s
- Ettaa 5y ago
  Exactly, like good ol' times
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- watersb 5y ago
  You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors.
  - watersb 5y ago
    The first "onboarding" I can remember, from Microsoft Word 6.0 in (?) 1993. It would display a dialog when you opened the program. Every. Damn. Time. Displayed a useful tip from the included documentation. At the time, it felt like a huge, complicated, OLE application, a big departure from the previous version, Word 5.1. I suspected that some members of the Word 6 product team felt the same about that startup dialog: at a loss to suggest anything productive for that "Useful product tip for today", they wrote down some inane safety tips. "Welcome to Microsoft Word... You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors."
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  I sympathose with the author, bit I shouldn't have to scroll past that to find out what does the tool he is raving about actually do. This stuff can go below that
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I originally was going to sarcastically point out that this just means it's at the early stages of the process, when it needs to attract the power users and early adopters. Once they're on board they can start to annoy everyone and take advantage of the lock-in to attract more users while preventing current users from leaving. I then read that it was free and open, so felt bad, but did notice an ad for Excalidraw+, which basically means my cynical first take is likely to come true eventually, as that is what the market will optimize towards.
- simonh 5y ago
  OK it's pre-200x and you read about a new productivity app you want to try. You have to check it's compatible with your OS, figure out where and how you can buy it, wait for the diskettes or CD to ship or until you can visit a B&M store, run the installer, then manually enter a product key (fun!). You'd be lucky to have it all done in less than a week and a few hours of your time. How soon they forget!
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >You have to check it's compatible with your OS You still have to today. A lot of stuff is Mac/Windows/Linux exclusive. Sure, I can run Windows stuff on Linux and vice versa if I'm tech savvy, but Mac stuff requires buying Apple hardware, so that's a massive barrier right there. >figure out where and how you can buy it Or you could just download it. The internet existed pre 200x as well. > then manually enter a product key (fun!) Honestly, it was fun. Much more fun than the phone-home, always-on telemetry and invasive DRM that act like rootkits & spyware we have today. Good luck playing older games you bought and paid for who's DRM require authentication from the publisher's servers that went offline years ago. Yeah, fun! Back then, you paid for the product, you got your license and CD key, you owned it forever. No subscription rent seeking model BS. Maybe I'm just old and cranky.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      > Or you could just download it. Outside of free software/shareware, there wasn't a lot of software available for download in the 90s. And compatibility was a lot jankier in that the base systems sold to consumers were insufficient to run a lot of popular software. For folks like you or me, probably not a problem (unless you happened to have a graphics card that wasn't supported) since we'd generally have obscene (by the standards of the day) amounts of hard disk and RAM, but Mom's computer might have 4M of RAM and a 10G hard drive. Back in the floppy disk era the thing that always drove me nuts was that most (with very few exceptions) software vendors put the software key on the label of disk 1. Which would be in the drive when they asked you to enter the software key. I remember some OS/2 software that put it on disk 2 instead and I wanted to go to the company and kiss whoever it was who decided to do that.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  I agree with the annoyance of so many modern tools and all the crap to use them, and appreciate ExcaliDraw for not doing it, but what is this talk of productivity programs being some sort of nirvana before 200x?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fstrthnscnd 5y ago
You should probably show a confirmation box when leaving the page - if that's possible - unless that feature is disabled in demo mode?
- mdoms 5y ago
  Your drawing is saved when you leave the page. Dialog boxes are for destructive actions. There is no demo mode - what you're using is the full product.
  - fstrthnscnd 5y ago
    Great work!
musicale 5y ago
The same reason LisaDraw was good? http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/apple/lisa/office_system/A6L0142_LisaDraw_1983.pdf http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/apple/lisa/office_sys... (The well-written documentation is another nice aspect of LisaDraw.)
- musicale 5y ago
  Perhaps a more permanent link: https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/apple/lisa/office_system/A6L0142_LisaDraw_1983.pdf https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/apple/lisa/office_...
dang 5y ago
Past related threads: Excalidraw+ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034119 - May 2021 (31 comments) Show HN: It was fun generating version distributions charts for Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792169 - Jan 2021 (1 comment) One Year of Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608336 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525648 - June 2020 (54 comments) Building Excalidraw's P2P Collaboration Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719576 - March 2020 (1 comment) Show HN: Excalidraw – Sketch Hand-Drawn Like Diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146973 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101381 - Jan 2020 (21 comments)
- eranation 5y ago
  Thanks for the related links! It just shows what an amazing job to whomever leads Excalidraw does. They should be the poster child of PLG GTM done right. Fast time to hello world / time to value, doing the small things that make you not just use the product, but love the product. The difference between an MVP and an MLP. It's interesting how it's so rare that it makes so many of us praise them for no apparent reason other than spread the joy. p.s. that issue with worrying about pixel perfect alignment and having them do it "sloppy" so you don't worry about it, I wonder if that was intentional, if it was, genius move, as I think it's a fair assumption that wasting time on making things pixel perfect is something a lot of us suffer from...
User23 5y ago
> When you first open it, it looks kind of sloppy. It almost evokes Kidpix Kidpix. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
- jasonjayr 5y ago
  Oh no!
- barbs 5y ago
  If you're in the mood to take a trip down memory lane: https://kidpix.app/ https://kidpix.app/
- cdaringe 5y ago
  10/10 app. Kidpix4lyf3
jez 5y ago
It looks like they took the "sloppiness" off the handwriting mode. For me that was always the biggest turn off—I couldn't get over that I was penciling in some hand-written note, and for some reason there were two lines following my cursor, spiraling like twin dragons. It was so bad that my first time using the product I thought it was a bug or that I was using the wrong tool. The handwriting now is just a single line! Now my only other complaint with excalidraw is that for some reason on my iPad Pro in Safari, the handwriting is incredibly laggy, increasing the longer the stroke is. Which is weird, because in every other browser I've tried (Safari/Chrome/Firefox on various laptops) it's incredibly snappy. Glad to see things are improving! That's a sure sign of a company that listens to users.
- vjeux 5y ago
  Yeah sorry about the initial version of handwriting, we thought we could do a quick hack and use the multi point line rendering for it but it didn’t work well in practice. We switched to the awesome “perfect” library from Steve Ruiz instead. Could you create an issue about the lag on ipad pro, we should investigate and fix.
  - gcanyon 5y ago
    For what it's worth, I'm not seeing any lag on an iPad mini 6.
  - newman314 5y ago
    I started playing with containerizing Excalidraw but noticed that there were a bunch of security issues identified by Dependabot. Given that you already have Dependabot active, would you consider getting the dependencies somewhat up to date? Looks like the pull requests already exist... Thanks.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Dependabot is something like a modern plague of open source, together with the bot that closes issues automatically. Did you read through the security issues identified, familiar with the codebase enough that you can see that these issues are actually affecting the product? Most issues Dependabot opens on repositories I'm involved in, points to issues that has no bearing on the actual code, since it's security issues that are involving passing user code to specific functions, or simply regarding APIs that are never used in the first place. You don't have to be on the newest version of every single library, in most cases it doesn't make any sense to just upgrade for the sake of upgrade.
systemvoltage 5y ago
I am not convinced that this is better ('hand drawn diagrams'). We've been drawing diagrams of all kinds for a very long time with no hurdles whatsoever [1]. Millions of diagrams have been drawn by boring-big-corp orgs in PowerPoint. This just reads like a hipster fetish over aesthetics, not substance. And if we're talking about aesthetics, I much prefer Monodraw [2]. I have a bias for having appeal for boring things may be because it works and gets out of the way. Emojis in your readme? No thanks. That said, the app itself has great UX, especially onboarding. Just straight to drawing mode. Kind of like autodraw.io. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,_march_1977.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,... [2] https://monodraw.helftone.com/ https://monodraw.helftone.com/
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  The article does not seem to actually mention why Excalidraw is so better over the millions of diagram drawing programs already available for decades (many of them much more featureful). It just seems to mention why Excalidraw is better over your average website.
- jen729w 5y ago
  I find it better, in the same way that finding the PowerPoint ‘theme’ that makes everything a bit rough round the edges was also a revelation. The perfectionist in me won’t let me publish a regular, square-edged diagram unless it’s pixel-perfect. As a result, nothing ever gets published. Take away that absurd situation, make the whole thing a bit shabby, and the need for perfection disappears. In fact the ability to make it perfect disappears. Life changing. Sounds daft. Is absolutely true.
- escot 5y ago
  The line between aesthetics and substance can be…blurry, even hand drawn you could say.
Dunedan 5y ago
What I dislike about Excalidraw is the handwriting font. While it might look cute it hurts readability, which is something which I believe shouldn't be a compromise for stuff like technical documents.
- addcninblue 5y ago
  There are three selections for fonts! The monospace one is quite nice and readable.
  - newaccount74 5y ago
    All 3 of them are terrible! The handwritten one is really bad, I'd actually prefer Comic Sans. The fixed width font looks very inhomogeneous. The sans-serif is okay, but the serious "a"s clash with the playful style of the drawings.
- bzzzt 5y ago
  Sometimes it's not about looking cute, but to signal the 'sketch' phase from a design. When a sketch looks too professional there's going to be a disappointed pm or customer because it looks like it's almost finished when it's not even implemented.
  - Dunedan 5y ago
    If that's what happens in your org I believe there are more serious problems than choosing the right font.
asiachick 5y ago
Excalidraw might be good for it's intended purpose but I was introduced to it as an online interview tool and for that it completely sucked. The most important missing feature at the time was that to doesn't show other user's selections unlike many other collaboration tools. That means what you see is not what you're collaborators see. If you grab some shapes they don't see that you grabbed them. If you highlight a word or item in a list, they don't see you highlighted it. Further, unlike pretty much all similar software, they don't connect shapes and text. Place a shape, double click, a text box appears in the center of the shape. Drag the shape, the text doesn't go with it. This makes it super inefficient for most common use cases. People might want to separate the text from the shape but I'd argue that's an exception and should not be the default.
- wikibob 5y ago
  The text not being attached to the shapes makes it unusable for me. Also agree on missing some kind of laser pointer and or highlighter.
  - adamclifford84 5y ago
    The way Ive worked around that is to group the text and shape together, so they move as one.
- dwelle 5y ago
  > the most important missing feature at the time was that to doesn't show other user's selections unlike many other collaboration tools. That means what you see is not what you're collaborators see. If you grab some shapes they don't see that you grabbed them. This should work out of the box if you're collaborating. But, we've recently upgraded our collaboration servers and due to ServiceWorker caching it may be your colleague (or you) were connecting to the old one. Try hard refresh your browser.
Zaheer 5y ago
Link to Excalidraw: https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ Since there was no link in the article :)
- trzeci 5y ago
  Ha! That was a disturbing to read about something without any visible link to see it. :)
- zekenie 5y ago
  Thanks, just added one
aliswe 5y ago
Where are the drawings stored?
- franky47 5y ago
  In your browser's localStorage. Should you choose to share a drawing, it would be end-to-end encrypted and sent to the Excalidraw server. The sharing URL contains the ID of your drawing for retrieval, and the encryption/decryption key in the URL hash, which never reaches Excalidraw's servers (thus achieving E2EE).
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    I believe that Safari will delete local storage after 7 days. I don't if they found a solution for that?
    - mdoms 5y ago
      The solution is use a browser that isn't hostile.
      - exikyut 5y ago
        ipadshatter.wav
    - bmsleight_ 5y ago
      Possible to save the source to a .json and re-upload it. (Save button)
    - capableweb 5y ago
      https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-more/ https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki... > deleting all of a website’s script-writable storage after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site. So as long as you access the application once a week, you're safe. Or, alternatively: > As mentioned, the seven-day cap on script-writable storage is gated on “after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.” That is the case in Safari. Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted. Still, horrible idea and horrible implementation, but I think it's known by know that Apple/Safari will always be hostile towards web apps as it cuts into their own App Store revenue.
tunnuz 5y ago
Totally agree with this. I discovered Excalidraw by chance a couple of years back, and I couldn't believe what I saw. Free (as in beer and as in speech), instantly usable, useful features coming out over time. I converted several people in my company to use it, and to date use it to explain ideas in shared sessions (I have a visual thinking and this really helps me getting concepts through to other people). My secret dream is to be able to build a bunch of tools like this (not for diagramming, for different things) that people love to use.
jacob_rezi 5y ago
Don't upsell (or if you do, do it tastefully) Example of a saas that does this?
u-rate 5y ago
No desktop version that works offline? No thanks.
- adamclifford84 5y ago
  Its a PWA so you can install it to your machine locally and it works just like a native app.
albertzeyer 5y ago
A similar app without the sloppiness but also very easy to use is draw.io. I am so far very happy with it and it looks good.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  It lacks the whiteboarding feature right?
  - davidjgraph 5y ago
    https://sketch.diagrams.net https://sketch.diagrams.net uses the same rough.js lib as excalidraw
    - dan-robertson 5y ago
      I don’t understand why you are replying to this thread and not the whole article? Is the thing you linked related to draw.io somehow?
      - roryokane 5y ago
        It is related: draw.io was renamed to diagrams.net. You can see the redirect if you visit https://draw.io/ https://draw.io/.
rcarmo 5y ago
I miss the days when these things would be desktop apps.
- petepete 5y ago
  Excalidraw is the only PWA I use. Shipping a cross-platform native app would be a massive pain.
- numlock86 5y ago
  You mean the times when a developer only had to provide a single version for a single OS instead of what we have today? Excalidraw can be used on basically everything that has a compatible browser: Windows, almost all Linux distros, macOS, Android and iOS, major BSDs ... and that's not even counting in x86 vs x86_64 vs all the different versions of ARM machines we have now. Try to reach all those people without a tech stack based on web. Sure, you can still get desktop and mobile apps by cramming everything into electron or its mobile counterparts, but then we are back to comments like "I miss the days when desktop apps were less than 100MB"? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - capableweb 5y ago
    I'm agreeing with your overall point, just wanted to share that APE (αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε)[1] actually can create a single binary that runs on Linux + Windows + Mac + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD, truly impressive. - 1, https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      That only solves 10% of the problem, binary portability. You still need to code for a dozen different graphics, I/O, storage etc system APIs.
      - capableweb 5y ago
        For that, see https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/ https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/ (C as a build-once run-anywhere language) and https://redbean.dev/ https://redbean.dev/ (single-file distributable web server)
vbg 5y ago
This is everything. Everything: “ You're in # There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product. Are there any flashy overlay tours with annoying animations and pulsing buttons? Is there a modal upselling you on a paid plan[1]? No. You're just in product, able to use it.” Get rid of your fancy growth marketing people, your advisors with their “request a demo”. Get rid of your intro page talking features. Dump your stupid signup before starting. Just. Fucking. Let. People. Instantly. Use. Your. Full. Product. Instantly. Not after they give their email. Not after they click three dialogs. Not after they jump through whatever remaining hoops you’d really really love them to jump through before. Show them, indeed GIVE them your product without the slightest fucking delay. All of it. Stop arguing about why you’d really love to make them do something else before using your product. Make your marketing person stop insisting the marketing thing gets done first. Get people into your actual full product within the shortest possible time. Milliseconds if possible.
- intrasight 5y ago
  There is an upsell to Excalidraw+, and it's the first thing I clicked on. $7/month.
- audunw 5y ago
  Two issues with that - Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is going to care about our wish for more companies to do this. - It doesn’t work for many products. How do you just drop someone into a cloud storage product? You could give them some temporary space where they can drop some files if they want, but what do you do if they abandon them? Delete them after some time? Might confuse some customers who didn’t realize they had to actually register an account. Maybe a huge banner with a countdown would work… you start to have to solve a whole lot of problems to make it work
  - vbg 5y ago
    But so many products that are well suited to immediate usage are hidden behind layers of explanation and marketing and signup and other irrelevant barriers.
personjerry 5y ago
So this is the free, online, collaborative Balsamiq substitute I've been looking for?
beebmam 5y ago
I genuinely can't stand the default font, and so many people tend to use it. My dyslexia makes it really difficult for me to read it. Please, please, Excalidraw owners if you're reading this: make the default font something that's much more friendly to those with dyslexia. Defaults matter a lot.
- janvdberg 5y ago
  Honest question: what is a good font for dyslexic people?
  - brianmcc 5y ago
    https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/ https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/
  - politelemon 5y ago
    Another one is OpenDyslexic https://opendyslexic.org/ https://opendyslexic.org/ Notice how parts of the letters are weighted. That helps with identifying which part of the letter is bottom. And its monospace equivalent for coding is OpenDyslexicMono
    - GordonS 5y ago
      As someone without dyslexia, I find that really difficult to read! I'm all for accessibility, but I personally wouldn't want this to be the default - would be great if users with dyslexia had the option to set it as their default though.
      - rbinv 5y ago
        Tampermonkey should be able to enforce typefaces across websites: https://www.tampermonkey.net/ https://www.tampermonkey.net/
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        Hm, I do not have dyslexia either and I find it maybe a bit odd at first glance, but not difficult? Is it maybe just a matter of getting used to it? Otherwise sure, the bewt option would be probably for people to use their own font and make it easy to do so (@browsers)
politelemon 5y ago
> Are there any flashy overlay tours with annoying animations and pulsing buttons? Is there a modal upselling you on a paid plan[1]? No. You're just in product, able to use it. This describes my first time experience with Miro. I just wanted to get started, but each new action resulted in another 'tour'. I patiently exited each tour, only to be hit by another tour/upsell/modal/what's new. Within 2 minutes I've now formed my first impression of Miro as being 'infested', and I reflexively microshudder when people talk about it. First time user experience feels severely underrated by many companies.
- the_other 5y ago
  You get them even when you’re perma-logged-in to a corporate account. (Ok, they’re “try our new feature” not “upgrade”, but they’re still an obstruction to “getting stuff done”). My eyesight’s not great. I typically use my computer at about 1.7x with pan&scan following my cursor. It’s not ideal but I can see (and am a career front-end dev with global brands on my CV). ANY kind of attention grabbing device is 1.7x more distracting to me than someone who can use their machine w/out zoom. I rely far more on my memory of where content and controls apprar than a fully sighted person, so having to find a new control (close) for a popup I didn’t ask for is a significant workflow impediment.
- peterkelly 5y ago
  It's like how some games will force you to sit through a 10 minute intro, followed by a tutorial level with "helpful" characters telling you how to use all the controls, instead of just dropping you straight into the action.
AussieWog93 5y ago
135 base physical attack. Being able to run an Adamant nature and still outspeeding most of the meta due to Sand Rush. Half decent bulk with amazing defensive typing. Multiple viable sets; you don't know if you're coming up against a defensive spinner or a juggernaut that can get to +2/+2 in one turn with Swords Dance. Stab EQ with decent coverage. "Good" is an understatement and a half.
- Starlevel001 5y ago
  Yet he still dropped to UU this gen. Not that good!
- jen729w 5y ago
  Is this a really weird HN cross-post error?
  - nightcracker 5y ago
    No, it is a Pokémon reference to the very similarly named Excadrill.
    - jen729w 5y ago
      Ha! Thanks.
    - vjeux 5y ago
      Fwiw, Ken Wheeler suggested the name excalibur but when looking for the domain it was already taken but excalibur.draw was suggested. I ended up bringing the two together leading to excalidraw, which was available everywhere.
franzwong 5y ago
It is handy when I have lots of remote meeting since the pandemic. But I always need to convert it back to Gliffy for Confluence.
piokoch 5y ago
"Too see what's possible, hit the question mark in the lower right corner" this works, almost... I have vimium installed so ? displays viumium help. This is a remainder that still there is a gap between native apps and in-browser apps. Yes, it is shrinking, but browser was never designed as the platform the run full-featured applications. So expect the unexpected. But, true, comparing to other software of this kind this one looks really good.
- onion2k 5y ago
  browser was never designed as the platform the run full-featured applications Does that mean they shouldn't ever change to become a platform for full-feature applications? Is there a reason why browsers shouldn't evolve and grow and add new capabilities? We don't believe that operating systems should be static once they've been released, or that applications should never add new features that enable them to run scripts or plugins. What's wrong with browsers doing more than Tim Berners-Lee envisioned 30 years ago? Sure, browsers were once designed to view docs. Now they do more. That's a good thing even if it throws up some design, UX, and security challenges.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > "Too see what's possible, hit the question mark in the lower right corner" this works, almost... I think they are referring to the actual button in the UI, which is in the button right, not the "?" key on your keyboard which might or might not be in the bottom right in your keyboard. Anyway, as a user of Vimuim, you're surely used to keyboard shortcuts already being funky, and you know about the "escape" mode it surely offers in order to trigger keyboard shortcuts that conflicts with your own bindings. Just use that instead of complaining as it's your own setup that makes things difficult, not the website owners fault really. It's a bit like writing something like "Hey, I use a extension that makes all elements background black on page load, and on your website, since the text is already black, makes it very hard to read stuff" I say this as a vim-keybindings-in-browser user myself too.
- tiddles 5y ago
  You can go into insert mode with i, then keys like question mark will be forwarded to the site.
red_trumpet 5y ago
Why is there no move tool? That makes it difficult to use with a drawing tablet.
- shaicoleman 5y ago
  Use the select tool to move things
- dwelle 5y ago
  It's coming...
- vjeux 5y ago
  Agreed. It was originally developed for desktop use cases and we did a straight port to mobile which surprisingly worked way better than I anticipated. But we need to do another pass at it, the lack of move tool is really annoying indeed. I also want to add more gestures. Procreate is so good and we should aim to be a similar experience.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Hey Zeke, just wanted to give a bit of feedback on the site. I’m looking at it on an iPad, and the side margins are 100% edge-to-ege. I’d suggest a 20-pixel gutter on either side of the page. Looks like an interesting product. Thanks!
- zekenie 5y ago
  Hey! Thanks. I just tweaked the breakpoint for the padding.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
Web only, correct? I wouldn't mind an offline version. I usually need to do this kind of work on planes.
- capableweb 5y ago
  As far as I can tell, https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ is already possible to use offline, since it seems to be a PWA. Just a friendly reminder that "web !== requiring internet 24/7 internet connectivity", many client-side applications works even if you go offline, granted you have loaded the page at least once before. Try loading the page, disconnecting your internet and then doing a hard-refresh/reload your browser.
- adamclifford84 5y ago
  Excalidraw is a PWA, so you should be able to install it as an app on your local machine and use it off line.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  I haven't tested it rigorously but it appears to work seamlessly when offline.
- dwelle 5y ago
  You can install it as PWA app both on your mobile (added to your home screen) or desktop that works offline :).
- zekenie 5y ago
  I use the pwa
nubela 5y ago
Is there something like Excalidraw but "drawn" with keyboard instead of mouse+keyboard? I'd really prefer not to use my mouse as much as I can.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Yeah I really want a design tool that’s built around a CAD or vim-like keyboard input mechanism
- idorosen 5y ago
  There’s dotty, or pgf/TiKZ in latex.
- kolla 5y ago
  you want etch a sketch? https://jenniferdewalt.com/etch_a_sketch.html https://jenniferdewalt.com/etch_a_sketch.html
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  I like textdraw from my distro's repo. It's very basic and probably not for everybody but I usually use r for rectangle, t for text and l for line, then copy and paste or screenshot.
- escot 5y ago
  Im making that at least for graph editing: https://www.knotend.com https://www.knotend.com Its a general purpose DAG/flowchart editor completely optimized for keyboard shortcuts. No need to touch the mouse almost ever. Like excalidraw you can use a basic version immediately, no account. I recommend watching the 1min video and checking out the keyboard shortcuts menu because its a bit different from other flowchart editors. 1min tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR0samb194 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR0samb194
queuep 5y ago
Umm, when I use Draw.io I can create a box and double click(or just select and start writing) it to write text inside it. How do I attach text to a figure in this tool? Feels weird when I move a figure and I need to select the text and the figure.
- comma_at 5y ago
  select them and group them (Ctrl+G or find it under Actions on the left bottom part of the screen)
- and0rskr 5y ago
  yes. I tried this tool for the first time and the best way I found was just to make a text block and group it with the box. But it would be great to just be able to double click the box and auto-center a text block it within the box.
- vjeux 5y ago
  Yeah, this is one of the top things we want to address. Right now text and shapes are not linked with each other which makes it super annoying to use. We just shipped image support which has been widely requested, this is next in our list.
jansan 5y ago
Small criticism in case excalidraw developers are reading: Those shape icons look like brush shapes. Please make them hollow.
toyg 5y ago
"You know how I know Berner-Lee's dream is dead? When I read a long blog post about how fantastic a tool is, and there is NOT ONE SINGLE HYPERLINK TO THE GODDAMN TOOL." "Oh, just google it" "Yes, but google was not present in the WWW design, was it? And then you have to worry about fakes, clones, phishing sites... The new generations turned the web into an interactive newspaper with more ads."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- winter_squirrel 5y ago
  Not much can come off as more pretentious than someone pretending to have a conversation with themselves about how they would win an argument.
- thorin 5y ago
  Ha ha, I was thinking exactly the same thing.
- zekenie 5y ago
  Fair point! Added it
  - bena 5y ago
    Ah. Because I saw his critique and I clicked on the article to see if that was true. But you must have added by then because I saw it right there at the top.
    - toyg 5y ago
      Let it never be said that complaining on a web forum is useless! Express yourself, bitches.
- necovek 5y ago
  There was a screenshot showing the URL: I simply typed it in :D Sometimes, even when I google things out, I type the URL in myself to avoid going through multiple redirects on google.com pages and to give me a clean copy-pasteable link right away.
nadam 5y ago
>if you're building a tool and you want your users to love you and to tell their friends ... >Don't upsell This is good advice for people for whom money is not a concern anymore, and their goal in life is to make random hipsters on the internet 'love them'. For the rest of us the goal is to make money with our work (and we get the love mostly from our family and friends.) What a one-sided article with so many upvotes...
- zekenie 5y ago
  Hi! It wasn't my intent to be one-sided, just to share my perspective, which I guess you could say is by definition "one sided" :) The creator of Excalidraw made a comment somewhere else on this page about how well Excalidraw+ is doing. > The plus plan has been very successful from my point of view, we’ve been able to bootstrap the business and make our first hire. The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open source model works really well for individuals, it’s hard for companies to adopt. > They want authentication, security policies, private spaces to collaborate, access control, search… all of this requires having a company behind it in practice and the open source model doesn’t work as well. > The two versions so far work really well alongside each other right now. I think there are certainly products out there that can't pull this off. And, that's a fair point.
- yummypaint 5y ago
  Users can tell when developers choose to accomodate themselves rather than improve UX. An upsell isn't just an upsell, it creates mistrust and triggers memories of the thousands of long-gone companies who milked their users for everything they could before abruptly dissappearing. The requirement that a piece of code make money is a major liability and automatically throws its future into question. It means the metric has changed from "does this solve the problem?" to "does this make enough money?" When desperate measures are being taken to monetize code, people sensibly run away. Users just want to use tools that work without getting jerked around.
  - stnmtn 5y ago
    I don't understand how this comment is anything other than "beggars can't be choosers" You want free software, that never asks you for money, that stays updated?
lqet 5y ago
For anyone looking for a drawing editor to produce professionally looking diagrams, I can only recommend ipe [0]. [0] https://ipe.otfried.org/ https://ipe.otfried.org/
thorin 5y ago
I mean, it's ok, I just used it for 10 mins and it seems to work well. I like the simplicity. For me, draw.io strikes the right balance of simple enough and free with enough features to actually replace stuff like Visio for my use case especially as the orgs I work for seem to be dropping the Visio licenses for all, which makes it essentially useless.
- pantulis 5y ago
  Draw.io is amazing too but the cognitive load is much too heavy for sketching (although you definitely can).
  - davidjgraph 5y ago
    https://sketch.diagrams.net https://sketch.diagrams.net
    - pantulis 5y ago
      Count me impressed, sir, and thanks for this.
    - atentaten 5y ago
      mind blown from not knowing this existed...
- justusthane 5y ago
  draw.io (now diagrams.net) is great! One killer feature: if you save your diagram as a PNG, the PNG contains the diagram itself as metadata! This means that anyone can view it as an image, but if someone opens it in diagrams.net they can edit it!
  - MaxDPS 5y ago
    Wow! That’s awesome! Thanks for pointing that out.
  - WickyNilliams 5y ago
ac42 5y ago
The Python of drawing tools.
ubercore 5y ago
This feels like rediscovering balsamiq, which made a splash about 12 years ago.
- kensai 5y ago
  I thought of the same. But if this is free and with a vibrant community of libraries, it could make an even bigger splash!
brrrrrm 5y ago
“polish is illegal, allowing you to stay in idea-space” I’ve been noticing this design trend in other sites too and I really like it
mplanchard 5y ago
According to a friend who works adjacent to them, this was made by the same person that created prettier.js, and both were developed as part of their work at FB. I haven’t independently verified, but that’s certainly an impressive portfolio if true.
- vjeux 5y ago
  I technically didn’t create prettier, James Long did. But I brought it from a 3-weeks prototype over the winter break to a production ready tool used for all Facebook codebase and nowadays to most of the world.
ryloric 5y ago
I used to use it a bit to draw graphs, but I've since come across mermaid[0] and it's even better for this task. It doesn't have the kind of flexibility a mouse based tool like excalidraw has but it's faster and easier to use for me. [0] https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid
- eb0la 5y ago
  Mermaid is great. I remember sending a diagram made with MermaidJs to the security officer of a big retailer and the guy said that that was the tool (and the information) he wished he had the day he joined the company. I am using PlantUML instead and C4 some time ago. Works very well inside VSCode, but Mermaid was quick.
- crowbahr 5y ago
  I love mermaid charts and especially love that they integrate with my preferred markdown note-taking software: https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md
  - shados 5y ago
    Mermaid is cool. Excalidraw has fantastic obsidian integration too though!
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    oh nice, I'll have to see what plugins obsidian has for this.
    - crowbahr 5y ago
      Base obsidian should have mermaid charts unless I'm mistaken. It's pretty neat.
- zekenie 5y ago
  I want to love mermaid so much... i've tried several times. It just hasn't gotten into muscle memory for me yet
gjvc 5y ago
this reminds me of the Draw application from RISC OS
Veuxdo 5y ago
I mean, it's good, but it's a drag-and-drop diagramming app. Great for simple, ad-hoc diagrams, but not great for big/long-term projects.
pkilgore 5y ago
I pay for a pro plan even though I barely ever remember to log in just because I want to make sure this thing sticks around and continues to get love.
Thaxll 5y ago
And yet the paid version has everything OP is complaining about: https://plus.excalidraw.com/?utm_source=excalidraw&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=launch https://plus.excalidraw.com/?utm_source=excalidraw&utm_mediu...
amelius 5y ago
How do you rotate artwork in Excaildraw?
- vjeux 5y ago
  If you select an element (or groups of elements) there is a little circle that appears at the top of the selection rectangle, you can drag it around to make it rotate.
alberth 5y ago
Off topic: it's always surprised me that Microsoft never released an Online/Cloud version of Visio.
bidirectional 5y ago
Great tool, but I find the name quite strange. To me it's incredibly evocative of the 90s.
zamadatix 5y ago
If Exaclidraw seems too simple for your needs check out draw.io. Very similarly you can just open the page and start diagramming, you can choose to save to device or link to a cloud account later if you want. It tends to scale well into long term diagrams but doesn't have as simple an interface as a result.
nobleach 5y ago
Excalidraw is one example I use of software done right. They had a vision for what they wanted to provide. Their MVP was functional, and it scratched the basic itch. Since then, they've been adding features which only make it more awesome. It was already good, but they continue to make it great.
verisimi 5y ago
What an amazing tool! Thanks for posting!
OOPMan 5y ago
> It forces you to stay low fidelity. Because everything is rendered with rough.js (I think...), objects look sloppy and hand-drawn Um...what? Frankly, stuff that looks like this just annoys me.
d1sxeyes 5y ago
I used this for my wedding seating plan. My wife had a link so she could collaborate, and we could share easily with the catering company, the venue, and the decorator so that they could put everything in the right place. After the wedding, we got feedback from almost everyone that we’d given access to that it was a fantastic tool and it had made everything super easy. Absolutely brilliant experience, and I know it sounds pithy, but it took a load off our minds knowing that no-one would have different interpretations or versions or broken Excel sheets that didn’t clarify, or ugly Paint drawings etc.
aj7 5y ago
Amazing. Brings me back to the Mac 1984 days, Gonna have to pay these guys.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Small detail: the group/ungroup icon is really well done. Also, I like the name; glad they didn't call it "Drawify" "Charitify" "Whitebordify" "Thinkify" ... you get my drift.
95014_refugee 5y ago
Why is Excalidraw so slow?
capedape 5y ago
Also works seamlessly in Obsidian with the community plugin.
sannee 5y ago
Is it just me or does the app get rather unacceptable drawing latency after the screen is somewhat filled? On the other hand, I like that it actually handles pressure, though even the thinnest pen size is rather thick at the default zoom level and kind of hard to write with.

738 points by zekenie 5y ago

Balsamiq is better

> There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product. You mean like pretty much every single darned productivity program before year 200X? It's sad that this even has to be an issue.

Vinnl 5y ago
Also no install though.
- kazinator 5y ago
  Ah, but this business of being prompted to create an account also afflicts software that requires installation.
- kavalg 5y ago
  they do have a docker image (no collaboration though)
- remus 5y ago
  It's actually a pretty good example of a PWA which can be installed (depending on whether your platform supports it, works well with chrome and windows, sorta works on iOS but more fiddly. Havent tried firefox).
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    It can be, but I was mostly trying to list a benefit that the "good old" apps didn't have, i.e. not needing to install it. That said, I'd also misunderstood the grandparent comment: they meant that it's a shame that Excalidraw is one of the few apps nowadays that have these features, even if the other ones also have advantages like not requiring an install.
jamil7 5y ago
No annoying drip emails “checking in” every few days.
- jesterson 5y ago
  "Hey, I know you are super busy but I just wanted to check..." Makes me want to ditch the product on the spot. Yes, I've seen your emails. Yes, I will let you know if I need anything. No, I don't need a zoom call/onboarding video/introductory convo with your marketing team.
  - ballenf 5y ago
    Ditching the product is probably the goal of the email, if the stats show that paid adoption happens within x days 98% of the time. What I think those stats miss is that I will test a product with one email and if I decide to buy for a team will use a new account. So it looks like the conversion happened immediately skewing their sales/marketing strategy.
sytelus 5y ago
Yes, but they also don’t have to run series rounds, forced to grow 50% YoY, exit in 5 years and retire before they turn 30.
dgb23 5y ago
Not sure what you are comparing this against? --- First of all it's a free, open tool, MIT license, that is also hosted for free. It loads instantly without an installation step. You just type in the URL and it works. It's not a "productivity program" specifically as illustrated in the article. The design is very simple, intuitive and deliberately minimalist, while it does quite a bunch of subtle things under the hood that harmonize with the overall goal of the program. --- Now there may have been tools kind of like this in the 90's. Not aware of any of them from the top of my head.
- michaelt 5y ago
  I assume kazinator means: In Office 95, you click the Excel icon and it opens to a blank document with no login or registration or anything like that. As did drawing software, 3D modelling software, and so on. Of course, arguably one did have to pay for it and install it - but that was a one-off thing.
  - samstave 5y ago
    Dear god - anyone here have to setup licensing servers for high-end 3D software from the past, like Softimage or Alias|Wavefront - those were a bitch, and if you lost connection to the licensing server, you couldnt run the program.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Excalidraw is akin to dia, but on the web. Also, it's more targeted and polished it seems, and that's nice.
  - BjoernKW 5y ago
    People might be seeing this through slightly rose-tinted glasses. Yes, you could use Excel 95 by just double-clicking on an icon. However, not only did you have to buy and install the software, which back in the day often meant going to an actual brick-and-mortar store to purchase a shrink-wrapped box labelled "Office 95", but it even required buying a specific type of computer with a specific operating system first. In this specific case, that doesn't even take into account Microsoft's shady tactics of strong-arming vendors and OEMs into exclusively shipping Microsoft software with their products. So, arguably, the barrier to entry still was a lot higher than with even the most obnoxious growth hacking tactics we see in many SaaS products today. That said, I absolutely love the way Excalidraw are "onboarding" users. It's just worth remembering that not everything went downhill with SaaS products (in fact, quite the opposite) and not everything was better "back in the day".
OneTimePetes 5y ago
Google and Co really dragged this industry into the mudpit.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  You mean that the companies making insane margins and paying top compensation are exactly the ones responsible for most of this this since they're massively profiting from monetizing consumers through various dark patterns, ads and spying? Shocking! Who would have thought? /s
Ettaa 5y ago
Exactly, like good ol' times
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
watersb 5y ago
You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors.
- watersb 5y ago
  The first "onboarding" I can remember, from Microsoft Word 6.0 in (?) 1993. It would display a dialog when you opened the program. Every. Damn. Time. Displayed a useful tip from the included documentation. At the time, it felt like a huge, complicated, OLE application, a big departure from the previous version, Word 5.1. I suspected that some members of the Word 6 product team felt the same about that startup dialog: at a loss to suggest anything productive for that "Useful product tip for today", they wrote down some inane safety tips. "Welcome to Microsoft Word... You can hurt yourself if you run with scissors."
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
I sympathose with the author, bit I shouldn't have to scroll past that to find out what does the tool he is raving about actually do. This stuff can go below that
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I originally was going to sarcastically point out that this just means it's at the early stages of the process, when it needs to attract the power users and early adopters. Once they're on board they can start to annoy everyone and take advantage of the lock-in to attract more users while preventing current users from leaving. I then read that it was free and open, so felt bad, but did notice an ad for Excalidraw+, which basically means my cynical first take is likely to come true eventually, as that is what the market will optimize towards.
simonh 5y ago
OK it's pre-200x and you read about a new productivity app you want to try. You have to check it's compatible with your OS, figure out where and how you can buy it, wait for the diskettes or CD to ship or until you can visit a B&M store, run the installer, then manually enter a product key (fun!). You'd be lucky to have it all done in less than a week and a few hours of your time. How soon they forget!
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >You have to check it's compatible with your OS You still have to today. A lot of stuff is Mac/Windows/Linux exclusive. Sure, I can run Windows stuff on Linux and vice versa if I'm tech savvy, but Mac stuff requires buying Apple hardware, so that's a massive barrier right there. >figure out where and how you can buy it Or you could just download it. The internet existed pre 200x as well. > then manually enter a product key (fun!) Honestly, it was fun. Much more fun than the phone-home, always-on telemetry and invasive DRM that act like rootkits & spyware we have today. Good luck playing older games you bought and paid for who's DRM require authentication from the publisher's servers that went offline years ago. Yeah, fun! Back then, you paid for the product, you got your license and CD key, you owned it forever. No subscription rent seeking model BS. Maybe I'm just old and cranky.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    > Or you could just download it. Outside of free software/shareware, there wasn't a lot of software available for download in the 90s. And compatibility was a lot jankier in that the base systems sold to consumers were insufficient to run a lot of popular software. For folks like you or me, probably not a problem (unless you happened to have a graphics card that wasn't supported) since we'd generally have obscene (by the standards of the day) amounts of hard disk and RAM, but Mom's computer might have 4M of RAM and a 10G hard drive. Back in the floppy disk era the thing that always drove me nuts was that most (with very few exceptions) software vendors put the software key on the label of disk 1. Which would be in the drive when they asked you to enter the software key. I remember some OS/2 software that put it on disk 2 instead and I wanted to go to the company and kiss whoever it was who decided to do that.
gilbetron 5y ago
I agree with the annoyance of so many modern tools and all the crap to use them, and appreciate ExcaliDraw for not doing it, but what is this talk of productivity programs being some sort of nirvana before 200x?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

fstrthnscnd 5y ago

You should probably show a confirmation box when leaving the page - if that's possible - unless that feature is disabled in demo mode?

mdoms 5y ago
Your drawing is saved when you leave the page. Dialog boxes are for destructive actions. There is no demo mode - what you're using is the full product.
- fstrthnscnd 5y ago
  Great work!

musicale 5y ago

The same reason LisaDraw was good? http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/apple/lisa/office_system/A6L0142_LisaDraw_1983.pdf http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/apple/lisa/office_sys... (The well-written documentation is another nice aspect of LisaDraw.)

musicale 5y ago
Perhaps a more permanent link: https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/apple/lisa/office_system/A6L0142_LisaDraw_1983.pdf https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/apple/lisa/office_...

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: Excalidraw+ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034119 - May 2021 (31 comments) Show HN: It was fun generating version distributions charts for Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792169 - Jan 2021 (1 comment) One Year of Excalidraw - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608336 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525648 - June 2020 (54 comments) Building Excalidraw's P2P Collaboration Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719576 - March 2020 (1 comment) Show HN: Excalidraw – Sketch Hand-Drawn Like Diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146973 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101381 - Jan 2020 (21 comments)

eranation 5y ago
Thanks for the related links! It just shows what an amazing job to whomever leads Excalidraw does. They should be the poster child of PLG GTM done right. Fast time to hello world / time to value, doing the small things that make you not just use the product, but love the product. The difference between an MVP and an MLP. It's interesting how it's so rare that it makes so many of us praise them for no apparent reason other than spread the joy. p.s. that issue with worrying about pixel perfect alignment and having them do it "sloppy" so you don't worry about it, I wonder if that was intentional, if it was, genius move, as I think it's a fair assumption that wasting time on making things pixel perfect is something a lot of us suffer from...

User23 5y ago

> When you first open it, it looks kind of sloppy. It almost evokes Kidpix Kidpix. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

jasonjayr 5y ago
Oh no!
barbs 5y ago
If you're in the mood to take a trip down memory lane: https://kidpix.app/ https://kidpix.app/
cdaringe 5y ago
10/10 app. Kidpix4lyf3

jez 5y ago

It looks like they took the "sloppiness" off the handwriting mode. For me that was always the biggest turn off—I couldn't get over that I was penciling in some hand-written note, and for some reason there were two lines following my cursor, spiraling like twin dragons. It was so bad that my first time using the product I thought it was a bug or that I was using the wrong tool. The handwriting now is just a single line! Now my only other complaint with excalidraw is that for some reason on my iPad Pro in Safari, the handwriting is incredibly laggy, increasing the longer the stroke is. Which is weird, because in every other browser I've tried (Safari/Chrome/Firefox on various laptops) it's incredibly snappy. Glad to see things are improving! That's a sure sign of a company that listens to users.

vjeux 5y ago
Yeah sorry about the initial version of handwriting, we thought we could do a quick hack and use the multi point line rendering for it but it didn’t work well in practice. We switched to the awesome “perfect” library from Steve Ruiz instead. Could you create an issue about the lag on ipad pro, we should investigate and fix.
- gcanyon 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm not seeing any lag on an iPad mini 6.
- newman314 5y ago
  I started playing with containerizing Excalidraw but noticed that there were a bunch of security issues identified by Dependabot. Given that you already have Dependabot active, would you consider getting the dependencies somewhat up to date? Looks like the pull requests already exist... Thanks.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Dependabot is something like a modern plague of open source, together with the bot that closes issues automatically. Did you read through the security issues identified, familiar with the codebase enough that you can see that these issues are actually affecting the product? Most issues Dependabot opens on repositories I'm involved in, points to issues that has no bearing on the actual code, since it's security issues that are involving passing user code to specific functions, or simply regarding APIs that are never used in the first place. You don't have to be on the newest version of every single library, in most cases it doesn't make any sense to just upgrade for the sake of upgrade.

systemvoltage 5y ago

I am not convinced that this is better ('hand drawn diagrams'). We've been drawing diagrams of all kinds for a very long time with no hurdles whatsoever [1]. Millions of diagrams have been drawn by boring-big-corp orgs in PowerPoint. This just reads like a hipster fetish over aesthetics, not substance. And if we're talking about aesthetics, I much prefer Monodraw [2]. I have a bias for having appeal for boring things may be because it works and gets out of the way. Emojis in your readme? No thanks. That said, the app itself has great UX, especially onboarding. Just straight to drawing mode. Kind of like autodraw.io. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,_march_1977.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,... [2] https://monodraw.helftone.com/ https://monodraw.helftone.com/

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
The article does not seem to actually mention why Excalidraw is so better over the millions of diagram drawing programs already available for decades (many of them much more featureful). It just seems to mention why Excalidraw is better over your average website.
jen729w 5y ago
I find it better, in the same way that finding the PowerPoint ‘theme’ that makes everything a bit rough round the edges was also a revelation. The perfectionist in me won’t let me publish a regular, square-edged diagram unless it’s pixel-perfect. As a result, nothing ever gets published. Take away that absurd situation, make the whole thing a bit shabby, and the need for perfection disappears. In fact the ability to make it perfect disappears. Life changing. Sounds daft. Is absolutely true.
escot 5y ago
The line between aesthetics and substance can be…blurry, even hand drawn you could say.

Dunedan 5y ago

What I dislike about Excalidraw is the handwriting font. While it might look cute it hurts readability, which is something which I believe shouldn't be a compromise for stuff like technical documents.

addcninblue 5y ago
There are three selections for fonts! The monospace one is quite nice and readable.
- newaccount74 5y ago
  All 3 of them are terrible! The handwritten one is really bad, I'd actually prefer Comic Sans. The fixed width font looks very inhomogeneous. The sans-serif is okay, but the serious "a"s clash with the playful style of the drawings.
bzzzt 5y ago
Sometimes it's not about looking cute, but to signal the 'sketch' phase from a design. When a sketch looks too professional there's going to be a disappointed pm or customer because it looks like it's almost finished when it's not even implemented.
- Dunedan 5y ago
  If that's what happens in your org I believe there are more serious problems than choosing the right font.

asiachick 5y ago

Excalidraw might be good for it's intended purpose but I was introduced to it as an online interview tool and for that it completely sucked. The most important missing feature at the time was that to doesn't show other user's selections unlike many other collaboration tools. That means what you see is not what you're collaborators see. If you grab some shapes they don't see that you grabbed them. If you highlight a word or item in a list, they don't see you highlighted it. Further, unlike pretty much all similar software, they don't connect shapes and text. Place a shape, double click, a text box appears in the center of the shape. Drag the shape, the text doesn't go with it. This makes it super inefficient for most common use cases. People might want to separate the text from the shape but I'd argue that's an exception and should not be the default.

wikibob 5y ago
The text not being attached to the shapes makes it unusable for me. Also agree on missing some kind of laser pointer and or highlighter.
- adamclifford84 5y ago
  The way Ive worked around that is to group the text and shape together, so they move as one.
dwelle 5y ago
> the most important missing feature at the time was that to doesn't show other user's selections unlike many other collaboration tools. That means what you see is not what you're collaborators see. If you grab some shapes they don't see that you grabbed them. This should work out of the box if you're collaborating. But, we've recently upgraded our collaboration servers and due to ServiceWorker caching it may be your colleague (or you) were connecting to the old one. Try hard refresh your browser.

Zaheer 5y ago

Link to Excalidraw: https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ Since there was no link in the article :)

trzeci 5y ago
Ha! That was a disturbing to read about something without any visible link to see it. :)
zekenie 5y ago
Thanks, just added one

aliswe 5y ago

Where are the drawings stored?

franky47 5y ago
In your browser's localStorage. Should you choose to share a drawing, it would be end-to-end encrypted and sent to the Excalidraw server. The sharing URL contains the ID of your drawing for retrieval, and the encryption/decryption key in the URL hash, which never reaches Excalidraw's servers (thus achieving E2EE).
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  I believe that Safari will delete local storage after 7 days. I don't if they found a solution for that?
  - mdoms 5y ago
    The solution is use a browser that isn't hostile.
    - exikyut 5y ago
      ipadshatter.wav
  - bmsleight_ 5y ago
    Possible to save the source to a .json and re-upload it. (Save button)
  - capableweb 5y ago
    https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-more/ https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki... > deleting all of a website’s script-writable storage after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site. So as long as you access the application once a week, you're safe. Or, alternatively: > As mentioned, the seven-day cap on script-writable storage is gated on “after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.” That is the case in Safari. Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted. Still, horrible idea and horrible implementation, but I think it's known by know that Apple/Safari will always be hostile towards web apps as it cuts into their own App Store revenue.

tunnuz 5y ago

Totally agree with this. I discovered Excalidraw by chance a couple of years back, and I couldn't believe what I saw. Free (as in beer and as in speech), instantly usable, useful features coming out over time. I converted several people in my company to use it, and to date use it to explain ideas in shared sessions (I have a visual thinking and this really helps me getting concepts through to other people). My secret dream is to be able to build a bunch of tools like this (not for diagramming, for different things) that people love to use.

jacob_rezi 5y ago

Don't upsell (or if you do, do it tastefully) Example of a saas that does this?

u-rate 5y ago

No desktop version that works offline? No thanks.

adamclifford84 5y ago
Its a PWA so you can install it to your machine locally and it works just like a native app.

albertzeyer 5y ago

A similar app without the sloppiness but also very easy to use is draw.io. I am so far very happy with it and it looks good.

dan-robertson 5y ago
It lacks the whiteboarding feature right?
- davidjgraph 5y ago
  https://sketch.diagrams.net https://sketch.diagrams.net uses the same rough.js lib as excalidraw
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    I don’t understand why you are replying to this thread and not the whole article? Is the thing you linked related to draw.io somehow?
    - roryokane 5y ago
      It is related: draw.io was renamed to diagrams.net. You can see the redirect if you visit https://draw.io/ https://draw.io/.

rcarmo 5y ago

I miss the days when these things would be desktop apps.

petepete 5y ago
Excalidraw is the only PWA I use. Shipping a cross-platform native app would be a massive pain.
numlock86 5y ago
You mean the times when a developer only had to provide a single version for a single OS instead of what we have today? Excalidraw can be used on basically everything that has a compatible browser: Windows, almost all Linux distros, macOS, Android and iOS, major BSDs ... and that's not even counting in x86 vs x86_64 vs all the different versions of ARM machines we have now. Try to reach all those people without a tech stack based on web. Sure, you can still get desktop and mobile apps by cramming everything into electron or its mobile counterparts, but then we are back to comments like "I miss the days when desktop apps were less than 100MB"? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- capableweb 5y ago
  I'm agreeing with your overall point, just wanted to share that APE (αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε)[1] actually can create a single binary that runs on Linux + Windows + Mac + FreeBSD + OpenBSD + NetBSD, truly impressive. - 1, https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    That only solves 10% of the problem, binary portability. You still need to code for a dozen different graphics, I/O, storage etc system APIs.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      For that, see https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/ https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/ (C as a build-once run-anywhere language) and https://redbean.dev/ https://redbean.dev/ (single-file distributable web server)

vbg 5y ago

This is everything. Everything: “ You're in # There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product. Are there any flashy overlay tours with annoying animations and pulsing buttons? Is there a modal upselling you on a paid plan[1]? No. You're just in product, able to use it.” Get rid of your fancy growth marketing people, your advisors with their “request a demo”. Get rid of your intro page talking features. Dump your stupid signup before starting. Just. Fucking. Let. People. Instantly. Use. Your. Full. Product. Instantly. Not after they give their email. Not after they click three dialogs. Not after they jump through whatever remaining hoops you’d really really love them to jump through before. Show them, indeed GIVE them your product without the slightest fucking delay. All of it. Stop arguing about why you’d really love to make them do something else before using your product. Make your marketing person stop insisting the marketing thing gets done first. Get people into your actual full product within the shortest possible time. Milliseconds if possible.

intrasight 5y ago
There is an upsell to Excalidraw+, and it's the first thing I clicked on. $7/month.
audunw 5y ago
Two issues with that - Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is going to care about our wish for more companies to do this. - It doesn’t work for many products. How do you just drop someone into a cloud storage product? You could give them some temporary space where they can drop some files if they want, but what do you do if they abandon them? Delete them after some time? Might confuse some customers who didn’t realize they had to actually register an account. Maybe a huge banner with a countdown would work… you start to have to solve a whole lot of problems to make it work
- vbg 5y ago
  But so many products that are well suited to immediate usage are hidden behind layers of explanation and marketing and signup and other irrelevant barriers.

personjerry 5y ago

So this is the free, online, collaborative Balsamiq substitute I've been looking for?

beebmam 5y ago

I genuinely can't stand the default font, and so many people tend to use it. My dyslexia makes it really difficult for me to read it. Please, please, Excalidraw owners if you're reading this: make the default font something that's much more friendly to those with dyslexia. Defaults matter a lot.

janvdberg 5y ago
Honest question: what is a good font for dyslexic people?
- brianmcc 5y ago
  https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/ https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/
- politelemon 5y ago
  Another one is OpenDyslexic https://opendyslexic.org/ https://opendyslexic.org/ Notice how parts of the letters are weighted. That helps with identifying which part of the letter is bottom. And its monospace equivalent for coding is OpenDyslexicMono
  - GordonS 5y ago
    As someone without dyslexia, I find that really difficult to read! I'm all for accessibility, but I personally wouldn't want this to be the default - would be great if users with dyslexia had the option to set it as their default though.
    - rbinv 5y ago
      Tampermonkey should be able to enforce typefaces across websites: https://www.tampermonkey.net/ https://www.tampermonkey.net/
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      Hm, I do not have dyslexia either and I find it maybe a bit odd at first glance, but not difficult? Is it maybe just a matter of getting used to it? Otherwise sure, the bewt option would be probably for people to use their own font and make it easy to do so (@browsers)

politelemon 5y ago

> Are there any flashy overlay tours with annoying animations and pulsing buttons? Is there a modal upselling you on a paid plan[1]? No. You're just in product, able to use it. This describes my first time experience with Miro. I just wanted to get started, but each new action resulted in another 'tour'. I patiently exited each tour, only to be hit by another tour/upsell/modal/what's new. Within 2 minutes I've now formed my first impression of Miro as being 'infested', and I reflexively microshudder when people talk about it. First time user experience feels severely underrated by many companies.

the_other 5y ago
You get them even when you’re perma-logged-in to a corporate account. (Ok, they’re “try our new feature” not “upgrade”, but they’re still an obstruction to “getting stuff done”). My eyesight’s not great. I typically use my computer at about 1.7x with pan&scan following my cursor. It’s not ideal but I can see (and am a career front-end dev with global brands on my CV). ANY kind of attention grabbing device is 1.7x more distracting to me than someone who can use their machine w/out zoom. I rely far more on my memory of where content and controls apprar than a fully sighted person, so having to find a new control (close) for a popup I didn’t ask for is a significant workflow impediment.
peterkelly 5y ago
It's like how some games will force you to sit through a 10 minute intro, followed by a tutorial level with "helpful" characters telling you how to use all the controls, instead of just dropping you straight into the action.

AussieWog93 5y ago

135 base physical attack. Being able to run an Adamant nature and still outspeeding most of the meta due to Sand Rush. Half decent bulk with amazing defensive typing. Multiple viable sets; you don't know if you're coming up against a defensive spinner or a juggernaut that can get to +2/+2 in one turn with Swords Dance. Stab EQ with decent coverage. "Good" is an understatement and a half.

Starlevel001 5y ago
Yet he still dropped to UU this gen. Not that good!
jen729w 5y ago
Is this a really weird HN cross-post error?
- nightcracker 5y ago
  No, it is a Pokémon reference to the very similarly named Excadrill.
  - jen729w 5y ago
    Ha! Thanks.
  - vjeux 5y ago
    Fwiw, Ken Wheeler suggested the name excalibur but when looking for the domain it was already taken but excalibur.draw was suggested. I ended up bringing the two together leading to excalidraw, which was available everywhere.

franzwong 5y ago

It is handy when I have lots of remote meeting since the pandemic. But I always need to convert it back to Gliffy for Confluence.

piokoch 5y ago

"Too see what's possible, hit the question mark in the lower right corner" this works, almost... I have vimium installed so ? displays viumium help. This is a remainder that still there is a gap between native apps and in-browser apps. Yes, it is shrinking, but browser was never designed as the platform the run full-featured applications. So expect the unexpected. But, true, comparing to other software of this kind this one looks really good.

onion2k 5y ago
browser was never designed as the platform the run full-featured applications Does that mean they shouldn't ever change to become a platform for full-feature applications? Is there a reason why browsers shouldn't evolve and grow and add new capabilities? We don't believe that operating systems should be static once they've been released, or that applications should never add new features that enable them to run scripts or plugins. What's wrong with browsers doing more than Tim Berners-Lee envisioned 30 years ago? Sure, browsers were once designed to view docs. Now they do more. That's a good thing even if it throws up some design, UX, and security challenges.
capableweb 5y ago
> "Too see what's possible, hit the question mark in the lower right corner" this works, almost... I think they are referring to the actual button in the UI, which is in the button right, not the "?" key on your keyboard which might or might not be in the bottom right in your keyboard. Anyway, as a user of Vimuim, you're surely used to keyboard shortcuts already being funky, and you know about the "escape" mode it surely offers in order to trigger keyboard shortcuts that conflicts with your own bindings. Just use that instead of complaining as it's your own setup that makes things difficult, not the website owners fault really. It's a bit like writing something like "Hey, I use a extension that makes all elements background black on page load, and on your website, since the text is already black, makes it very hard to read stuff" I say this as a vim-keybindings-in-browser user myself too.
tiddles 5y ago
You can go into insert mode with i, then keys like question mark will be forwarded to the site.

red_trumpet 5y ago

Why is there no move tool? That makes it difficult to use with a drawing tablet.

shaicoleman 5y ago
Use the select tool to move things
dwelle 5y ago
It's coming...
vjeux 5y ago
Agreed. It was originally developed for desktop use cases and we did a straight port to mobile which surprisingly worked way better than I anticipated. But we need to do another pass at it, the lack of move tool is really annoying indeed. I also want to add more gestures. Procreate is so good and we should aim to be a similar experience.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Hey Zeke, just wanted to give a bit of feedback on the site. I’m looking at it on an iPad, and the side margins are 100% edge-to-ege. I’d suggest a 20-pixel gutter on either side of the page. Looks like an interesting product. Thanks!

zekenie 5y ago
Hey! Thanks. I just tweaked the breakpoint for the padding.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

Web only, correct? I wouldn't mind an offline version. I usually need to do this kind of work on planes.

capableweb 5y ago
As far as I can tell, https://excalidraw.com/ https://excalidraw.com/ is already possible to use offline, since it seems to be a PWA. Just a friendly reminder that "web !== requiring internet 24/7 internet connectivity", many client-side applications works even if you go offline, granted you have loaded the page at least once before. Try loading the page, disconnecting your internet and then doing a hard-refresh/reload your browser.
adamclifford84 5y ago
Excalidraw is a PWA, so you should be able to install it as an app on your local machine and use it off line.
oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
I haven't tested it rigorously but it appears to work seamlessly when offline.
dwelle 5y ago
You can install it as PWA app both on your mobile (added to your home screen) or desktop that works offline :).
zekenie 5y ago
I use the pwa

nubela 5y ago

Is there something like Excalidraw but "drawn" with keyboard instead of mouse+keyboard? I'd really prefer not to use my mouse as much as I can.

ethanbond 5y ago
Yeah I really want a design tool that’s built around a CAD or vim-like keyboard input mechanism
idorosen 5y ago
There’s dotty, or pgf/TiKZ in latex.
kolla 5y ago
you want etch a sketch? https://jenniferdewalt.com/etch_a_sketch.html https://jenniferdewalt.com/etch_a_sketch.html
themodelplumber 5y ago
I like textdraw from my distro's repo. It's very basic and probably not for everybody but I usually use r for rectangle, t for text and l for line, then copy and paste or screenshot.
escot 5y ago
Im making that at least for graph editing: https://www.knotend.com https://www.knotend.com Its a general purpose DAG/flowchart editor completely optimized for keyboard shortcuts. No need to touch the mouse almost ever. Like excalidraw you can use a basic version immediately, no account. I recommend watching the 1min video and checking out the keyboard shortcuts menu because its a bit different from other flowchart editors. 1min tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR0samb194 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR0samb194

queuep 5y ago

Umm, when I use Draw.io I can create a box and double click(or just select and start writing) it to write text inside it. How do I attach text to a figure in this tool? Feels weird when I move a figure and I need to select the text and the figure.

comma_at 5y ago
select them and group them (Ctrl+G or find it under Actions on the left bottom part of the screen)
and0rskr 5y ago
yes. I tried this tool for the first time and the best way I found was just to make a text block and group it with the box. But it would be great to just be able to double click the box and auto-center a text block it within the box.
vjeux 5y ago
Yeah, this is one of the top things we want to address. Right now text and shapes are not linked with each other which makes it super annoying to use. We just shipped image support which has been widely requested, this is next in our list.

jansan 5y ago

Small criticism in case excalidraw developers are reading: Those shape icons look like brush shapes. Please make them hollow.

toyg 5y ago

"You know how I know Berner-Lee's dream is dead? When I read a long blog post about how fantastic a tool is, and there is NOT ONE SINGLE HYPERLINK TO THE GODDAMN TOOL." "Oh, just google it" "Yes, but google was not present in the WWW design, was it? And then you have to worry about fakes, clones, phishing sites... The new generations turned the web into an interactive newspaper with more ads."

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
winter_squirrel 5y ago
Not much can come off as more pretentious than someone pretending to have a conversation with themselves about how they would win an argument.
thorin 5y ago
Ha ha, I was thinking exactly the same thing.
zekenie 5y ago
Fair point! Added it
- bena 5y ago
  Ah. Because I saw his critique and I clicked on the article to see if that was true. But you must have added by then because I saw it right there at the top.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Let it never be said that complaining on a web forum is useless! Express yourself, bitches.
necovek 5y ago
There was a screenshot showing the URL: I simply typed it in :D Sometimes, even when I google things out, I type the URL in myself to avoid going through multiple redirects on google.com pages and to give me a clean copy-pasteable link right away.

nadam 5y ago

>if you're building a tool and you want your users to love you and to tell their friends ... >Don't upsell This is good advice for people for whom money is not a concern anymore, and their goal in life is to make random hipsters on the internet 'love them'. For the rest of us the goal is to make money with our work (and we get the love mostly from our family and friends.) What a one-sided article with so many upvotes...

zekenie 5y ago
Hi! It wasn't my intent to be one-sided, just to share my perspective, which I guess you could say is by definition "one sided" :) The creator of Excalidraw made a comment somewhere else on this page about how well Excalidraw+ is doing. > The plus plan has been very successful from my point of view, we’ve been able to bootstrap the business and make our first hire. The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open source model works really well for individuals, it’s hard for companies to adopt. > They want authentication, security policies, private spaces to collaborate, access control, search… all of this requires having a company behind it in practice and the open source model doesn’t work as well. > The two versions so far work really well alongside each other right now. I think there are certainly products out there that can't pull this off. And, that's a fair point.
yummypaint 5y ago
Users can tell when developers choose to accomodate themselves rather than improve UX. An upsell isn't just an upsell, it creates mistrust and triggers memories of the thousands of long-gone companies who milked their users for everything they could before abruptly dissappearing. The requirement that a piece of code make money is a major liability and automatically throws its future into question. It means the metric has changed from "does this solve the problem?" to "does this make enough money?" When desperate measures are being taken to monetize code, people sensibly run away. Users just want to use tools that work without getting jerked around.
- stnmtn 5y ago
  I don't understand how this comment is anything other than "beggars can't be choosers" You want free software, that never asks you for money, that stays updated?

lqet 5y ago

For anyone looking for a drawing editor to produce professionally looking diagrams, I can only recommend ipe [0]. [0] https://ipe.otfried.org/ https://ipe.otfried.org/

thorin 5y ago

I mean, it's ok, I just used it for 10 mins and it seems to work well. I like the simplicity. For me, draw.io strikes the right balance of simple enough and free with enough features to actually replace stuff like Visio for my use case especially as the orgs I work for seem to be dropping the Visio licenses for all, which makes it essentially useless.

pantulis 5y ago
Draw.io is amazing too but the cognitive load is much too heavy for sketching (although you definitely can).
- davidjgraph 5y ago
  https://sketch.diagrams.net https://sketch.diagrams.net
  - pantulis 5y ago
    Count me impressed, sir, and thanks for this.
  - atentaten 5y ago
    mind blown from not knowing this existed...
justusthane 5y ago
draw.io (now diagrams.net) is great! One killer feature: if you save your diagram as a PNG, the PNG contains the diagram itself as metadata! This means that anyone can view it as an image, but if someone opens it in diagrams.net they can edit it!
- MaxDPS 5y ago
  Wow! That’s awesome! Thanks for pointing that out.
- WickyNilliams 5y ago

ac42 5y ago

The Python of drawing tools.

ubercore 5y ago

This feels like rediscovering balsamiq, which made a splash about 12 years ago.

kensai 5y ago
I thought of the same. But if this is free and with a vibrant community of libraries, it could make an even bigger splash!

brrrrrm 5y ago

“polish is illegal, allowing you to stay in idea-space” I’ve been noticing this design trend in other sites too and I really like it

mplanchard 5y ago

According to a friend who works adjacent to them, this was made by the same person that created prettier.js, and both were developed as part of their work at FB. I haven’t independently verified, but that’s certainly an impressive portfolio if true.

vjeux 5y ago
I technically didn’t create prettier, James Long did. But I brought it from a 3-weeks prototype over the winter break to a production ready tool used for all Facebook codebase and nowadays to most of the world.

ryloric 5y ago

I used to use it a bit to draw graphs, but I've since come across mermaid[0] and it's even better for this task. It doesn't have the kind of flexibility a mouse based tool like excalidraw has but it's faster and easier to use for me. [0] https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid

eb0la 5y ago
Mermaid is great. I remember sending a diagram made with MermaidJs to the security officer of a big retailer and the guy said that that was the tool (and the information) he wished he had the day he joined the company. I am using PlantUML instead and C4 some time ago. Works very well inside VSCode, but Mermaid was quick.
crowbahr 5y ago
I love mermaid charts and especially love that they integrate with my preferred markdown note-taking software: https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md
- shados 5y ago
  Mermaid is cool. Excalidraw has fantastic obsidian integration too though!
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  oh nice, I'll have to see what plugins obsidian has for this.
  - crowbahr 5y ago
    Base obsidian should have mermaid charts unless I'm mistaken. It's pretty neat.
zekenie 5y ago
I want to love mermaid so much... i've tried several times. It just hasn't gotten into muscle memory for me yet

gjvc 5y ago

this reminds me of the Draw application from RISC OS

Veuxdo 5y ago

I mean, it's good, but it's a drag-and-drop diagramming app. Great for simple, ad-hoc diagrams, but not great for big/long-term projects.

pkilgore 5y ago

I pay for a pro plan even though I barely ever remember to log in just because I want to make sure this thing sticks around and continues to get love.

Thaxll 5y ago

And yet the paid version has everything OP is complaining about: https://plus.excalidraw.com/?utm_source=excalidraw&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=launch https://plus.excalidraw.com/?utm_source=excalidraw&utm_mediu...

amelius 5y ago

How do you rotate artwork in Excaildraw?

vjeux 5y ago
If you select an element (or groups of elements) there is a little circle that appears at the top of the selection rectangle, you can drag it around to make it rotate.

alberth 5y ago

Off topic: it's always surprised me that Microsoft never released an Online/Cloud version of Visio.

bidirectional 5y ago

Great tool, but I find the name quite strange. To me it's incredibly evocative of the 90s.

zamadatix 5y ago

If Exaclidraw seems too simple for your needs check out draw.io. Very similarly you can just open the page and start diagramming, you can choose to save to device or link to a cloud account later if you want. It tends to scale well into long term diagrams but doesn't have as simple an interface as a result.

nobleach 5y ago

Excalidraw is one example I use of software done right. They had a vision for what they wanted to provide. Their MVP was functional, and it scratched the basic itch. Since then, they've been adding features which only make it more awesome. It was already good, but they continue to make it great.

verisimi 5y ago

What an amazing tool! Thanks for posting!

OOPMan 5y ago

> It forces you to stay low fidelity. Because everything is rendered with rough.js (I think...), objects look sloppy and hand-drawn Um...what? Frankly, stuff that looks like this just annoys me.

d1sxeyes 5y ago

I used this for my wedding seating plan. My wife had a link so she could collaborate, and we could share easily with the catering company, the venue, and the decorator so that they could put everything in the right place. After the wedding, we got feedback from almost everyone that we’d given access to that it was a fantastic tool and it had made everything super easy. Absolutely brilliant experience, and I know it sounds pithy, but it took a load off our minds knowing that no-one would have different interpretations or versions or broken Excel sheets that didn’t clarify, or ugly Paint drawings etc.

aj7 5y ago

Amazing. Brings me back to the Mac 1984 days, Gonna have to pay these guys.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Small detail: the group/ungroup icon is really well done. Also, I like the name; glad they didn't call it "Drawify" "Charitify" "Whitebordify" "Thinkify" ... you get my drift.

95014_refugee 5y ago

Why is Excalidraw so slow?

capedape 5y ago

Also works seamlessly in Obsidian with the community plugin.

sannee 5y ago

Is it just me or does the app get rather unacceptable drawing latency after the screen is somewhat filled? On the other hand, I like that it actually handles pressure, though even the thinnest pen size is rather thick at the default zoom level and kind of hard to write with.