Apparently Excalidraw is An open source virtual hand-drawn style whiteboard. Collaborative and end-to-end encrypted.
replyI use Excalidraw extensively at work. For me, it's really close to perfection.
replyIt has an excellent UI, selections work way better than Lucid or Figma etc, the sketchy look makes it clear designs are rough and not blueprints, it's private and loads instantly.
The one negative is that it's a pain to get the multiplayer self-hosted version running.
The company where I'm contracted retired Excalidraw in favor of Lucid and, while I understand that big companies are going to go with big, enterprise-y solutions, what went from a weekly "sketch something out to help with communicating my ideas" turned into "once every few months I begrudgingly document something".
replyExcalidraw is excellent for low-friction sketches.
I was surprised about that, too. Tried a bit but found very few sources online.
replyA self-hosted version with storage (multiplayer) plus any Claude access would be a killer setup for team planning etc and let us drop Miro.
My favorite aspect of it is the keyboard shortcuts. It makes things so much faster.
reply[dead]
replyBoth Excalidraw and TLDraw are the two most popular apps of their kind, simplistic whiteboard tools, so I don't think it's that surprising and I don't see any reason why this post should be a "Show HN".
replyTLDraw: https://www.tldraw.com/
Excalidraw: https://excalidraw.com/
For me, draw.io is still the winner, and especially now that it runs locally also on Linux. As for works in progress, I hope this one succeeds (and would also run locally at some point):
replyTikzMaker: https://tikzmaker.com/
I love excalidraw, but don't need the excalidraw+. But Excalidraw open source is the frontend only, which means I have to delete my drawings each time. So I built the backend so I can create many canvases.
replyYour site makes me make an account before I can use it, whereas excalidraw.com doesn't, and also excalidraw.com seems to save my drawing just fine? I closed a tab and reopened it and my drawing was still there, presumably from localStorage.
replyThe three-lines-menu also has a "Save to..." option that lets you create a sharable link or save to your local disk.
You can also embed the excalidraw drawing in the exported image. So you can drag/drop the exorted image back into excalidraw and edit it later.
replyI actually created a completely free chrome extension exactly for that reason helps you to save and open the files at excalidraw
replyPretty new to hn, thanks for the hint
reply